" But the great record of S. Chad is himself, i.e. his bones, 

 which were abstracted from this Cathedral about 1550, a.d., 

 and now rest in the Roman Catholic Cathedral, at Birmingham. 

 The history of the removal of these relics is learnt from what 

 may be considered an authentic record in almost unintelligible 

 dog-Latin, submitted a few years back by some Roman Catholic 

 Priests to the late John Hewitt, Esq., of this city, a most trust- 

 worthy and painstaking archaeologist. He, failing to interpret 

 the documents, asked me to help him; and as the process whereby 

 I was enabled to interpret them may suggest to the members of 

 this Society how to use their ears as well as their eyes in the 

 study of Archaeology, I will give one specimen in detail. More- 

 over, the difficulty of discovering the real words and their meaning 

 seems to confirm the genuineness of the document. I regret that 

 Mr. Hewitt printed them in the Archaeological Journal with the 

 corrections instead of the errors. The Latin document tells us 

 that about the year 1620, one Henry Hodgetts, of Sedgley, on his 

 deathbed sent for a Priest. When the Priest was saying that part 

 of the service which appeals to the Saints, Hodgetts kept on 

 saying, ' Sancte Ceadda, ora pro nobis.' On the Priest asking him 

 the reason, he said that S. Chad was in the room, ' in nigra 

 exaudio.' The Latin word thus spelt means, ' I hear,' which, of 

 course, is nonsense. It was then I appealed to my ears to guide 

 me, and I remembered that there was another Latin word, exordio, 

 which means the beginning of a speech — but that sense would not 

 help us more than the former word. Yet I happened to know 

 why exordium means the beginning. It is properly the loose 

 threads of the woof that are fastened round the pegs of the loom 

 before the weaver can throw his shuttle across the warp ; of course 

 these loose ends when cut off made a kind of selvage, and wrapper 

 for S. Chad's bones. The Priest who wrote exaudio was so 

 puzzled by the word that he translated it himself, and added ' in 

 black buckram.' To proceed with the story; when the Priest 

 asked Hodgetts how he got possession of S. Chad, he told him 

 that the relics were given him by some ladies of noble birth 

 named Dudley, of Woodsetton, close to Sedgley Church. (I had 

 long before been shown the field where S. Chad was said to have 



