By the Rev. Canon Jackson, F.8.A. 303 
the peculiarities of language, for certainly the words and phrases 
used, and handed down for generations, can boast as fair an antiquity 
as anything else. 
I do not know a more difficult situation for a person to be placed 
in—and having been placed in it myself, I can vouch for the fact— 
than for a young man, educated up to twenty-three years of age in 
the elegant phraseology of classical Oxford, to be put down as a 
curate in a country village, say in Wiltshire—say, if you please, in 
the Vale of Warminster. I remember once, upon my first intro- 
duction in that character, not many miles from where we are, having 
some pastoral rebuke to administer to an old man grubbing a hedge. 
I addressed my lecture in the language I had been used to at Alma 
Mater. He did not make any answer, and I fondly thought that I 
had produced a deep impression ; at last, he quietly turned his head 
and said, “ What’s that as you do zay, zur?” I should like to hear 
a Wiltshire boy who had been three years at plough or sheep fold, 
cross examine one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, and ask 
him, in the article of a plough, to be so good as to explain the 
difference between the vore-shoot and back shoot, the ground rest, 
the bread board, the drail, the wing and point, and the whippence: 
or the riders and tines of a harrow, or the raves and spances and peel 
of a waggon. The learned inspector would also be not a little 
puzzled to hear a farmer give an order for the plough “to go for 
coal.” That may, perhaps, not be understood by everybody here. 
The team of oxen that drew the plough came to be called the plough, 
and in some parts of South Wilts they still call even a waggon and 
horses a plough. This is needful for you to know, in case your man 
should some day tell you that the plough is gone for coal. 
In the article of sheep what strange nomenclature! Besides the 
sintelligible names of ram, ewe and lamb, we have wether hogs, and 
chilver hogs, and shear hogs, ram teg’s, and theaves, and two-tooths, 
and four-tooths, and six-tooths. So strange is the confusion that 
the word hog is now applied to any animal of a year old, such as a 
hog bull, a chilver hog sheep. ‘“ Chilver” is a good Anglo-Saxon 
_ word, “ cylfer,” and means female,so a chilver hog sheep simply means, 
in the dialect of the Vale of Warminster, a female lamb a year old. 
VOL. XVII.—NO. LI. Z 
