Feb. 14. 1852.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



161 



the term Rotten Soto is a corruption of the name 

 orinrinally applied to the place whore the feudal 

 lord of a town or village held liis Bother or 

 muster, and where the Hots, into which his 

 vassals were divided, assembled for the purpose of 

 military exercise. P. T. 



Stoke Newington. 



" Preached from a Pulpit rather than a Tub " 

 (Vol. v., p. 29.) is from the conclusion of Religio 

 Clericl ; a Churchman's First Epistle, 3rd edition, 

 Murray, 1819. The author thus dictates his own 

 epitaph : — 



" This be my record : Solier, not austere, 

 A Churchman, honest to his Clmrch, lies here ; 

 Content to tread where wiser feet had trod, 

 He loved established modes of serving God ; 

 Preached from a pulpit rather than a tub, 

 And gave no guinea to a Bible Club," 



B. R. I. 



Olioarius (Vol. v., p. 60.). — Clericus D. may 

 be informed that the work of Petrus Joannes Oli- 

 varius de prophetiu; Basilea, 1543, is in the 

 library of Trinity College, Dublin. Tyeo. 



Dublin. 



Slavery in Scotland (Vol. v., p. 29.), — To the 

 question of E. F. L., as to what time the custom 

 of mitigating the punishment of condemned Scot- 

 tish criminals to perpetual servitude was done 

 away with, I cannot at present give a definite 

 answer ; but perhaps the following curious extract 

 from the Decisions of Fountainhall may be inte- 

 i-esting to enquirers on this subject : — 



" Reid, the MomUebank, pursues Scot of Harden and 

 his Lady, for stealing away from him a little Girl, 

 called the Tumbling Lassie, that danced upon his stage; 

 and he claimed damages, and produced a contract, 

 whereby he bought her from her mother, for £30 Scots. 

 But we have no Slaves in Scotland, and mothers cannot 

 sell their bairns; and physicians attested the employ- 

 ment of tumbling would kill her ; and her joints were 

 now grown stiff, and she declined to return ; though she 

 was at least a 'prentice, and so could not run away from 

 her master ; yet some cited Moses's Law, that if a servant 

 shelter himself with thee, against his master's cruelty, 

 thou shalt surely not deliver him up. The lords, 

 renitente cancellario, assoilzied Harden, on the 27th 

 January (1687)." — Vol. i, p. 439, R. S, F, 



Perth, 



Gibber's Lives of the Poets (Vol. v., pp. 25, 1 16.). 

 — P. T. says that " he has not Croker's last edition 

 of Boswell's Life of Johnson" to which Mr. Ckoss- 

 liET had referred him as to Shiells' share in Gib- 

 ber's Lives. He has printed " last " in Italics ; but 

 I see reason to suspect that he has not seen ani/ of 

 Mr, Croker's editions, nor even Boswell's own ; 

 for the MS. note which he quotes from a fly-leaf 

 of his (P. T.'s) copy of the Lives of the Poets, is 

 nothing but a verbal repetition of what Boswell 



had stated on Dr. Johnson's authority in his text, 

 but of which he had added a refutation in a note; 

 which note, with some corroborative circumstances, 

 was repeated in both Mr. Croker's editions. 



There can be no doubt that Shiells misled John- 

 son, and that Johnson misled Stevens, into the 

 statement which P. T. has copied at some third or 

 fourth hand, after it had been twice or thrice 

 refuted. 



It is a little hard that your valuable space should 

 be taken up by gentlemen who will not even take 

 the trouble of referring to the authorities where 

 you tell them that they will find an answer, and 

 then begin questioning again, as if you had not 

 already settled the matter. C. 



Theohneum (Vol. v., p. 105.). — Theoloneum is 

 the Latin law term for toll, corrupted from the 

 Greek Telonium. I am surprised that I cannot 

 find it either in Du Cange or Spelman. C. B. 



John of Padua (Vol. v., p. 78.). — I have often 

 endeavoured without success to obtain some cor- 

 rect particulars about John of Padua, and also to 

 ascertain whether he was the same person as "John 

 Thorpe," I hope, therefore, that the inquiry in 

 your last number may lead to a satisfactory result; 

 ibr we ought to know more of these worthies. 



Bbaybrooke. 



Audley End. 



StoJie (Vol. v., p. 106.). — W. B. asks the mean- 

 ing of the word stake in the names of places; as 

 Bishopstoke, Ulverstoke, &c. (Ulverstoke being, I 

 presume, a niiscopying or misprint of Alverstoke). 

 I cannot at all concur in the derivation you quote 

 from Bosworth, from stoc, "a place;" for then 

 every place might be called stohe without distinc- 

 tion. But in all the stakes that I remember in 

 England there is always and actually a kind of 

 stockade or sluice, which dams up some water- 

 course to a certain level. Whether this explana- 

 tion will apply to the local circumstances of all the 

 stokes, I know not ; but it certainly does to the 

 cases of Bishopstoke and Alverstoke, and of at 

 least half a dozen other stokes within my own ob- 

 servation. C. 



Eliza Penning (Yo\'\., p. 105.). — Eliza Fenning 

 was a maid servant convicted and executed for 

 poisoning her master's family. I happened to 

 be very intimate with some charitable and dis- 

 tinguished persons who had doubts of her guilt. 

 I myself did not partake those doubts, but I 

 assisted my friends in their benevolent inquiries, 

 and was so frequently in communication with 

 them both at the time, and long after, that I think 

 I may venture to say that there can be no found- 

 ation for the statement that another person had 

 confessed to the crime for which she sufiered. C. 



On or about Christmas Day, 1833, there may be 

 found in The Times newspaper a notice of the 



