Chubby-faced. 
365 
Drayton mentions:— Boach. 
" The Roche, whose common kind to every flood doth fall.” 
(PolyoTbion, song xxvi.) 
There was a mistaken notion that the Roach possessed an 
immunity for the various maladies that fish is heir to 
whence, according to some, its name. Muffett writes:— 
“ Roches, or Roch fishes (called so of Saint Roch, that legendary 
iEsculapius and giver of health) are esteemed and thought incapable 
of any disease, according to the old proverb, as sound as a roch.”' 
(Healths Improvement, p. 186.) 
The little Dace was also common. Drayton 
writes:— 
Dace. 
“ The pretty slender dare, of many called the Dace, 
Within my liquid glass, when Phoebus shows his face, 
Oft swiftly as he swims, his silver belly shows, 
But with such nimble sleight, that ere ye can disclose 
His shape, out of your sight like lightning he is shot.” 
( PolyoTbion , song xxvi.) 
Shakspeare’s only reference to this fish is as a bait for 
pike. 
“ The Chub, whose neater name, which some a 
chevin call. Chub. 
Food to the tyrant pike, most being in his power, 
Who for their numerous store he most doth them devour.” 
( PolyoTbion , song xxvi.) 
The chub, chevin, or chavender seems to have been 
more popular as a dainty in Shakspeare’s time than he is 
in these days. Dame Juliana Berners writes of him, 
“ The chevyn is a stately fysshe: and his heed is a deynty 
morsell. There is noo fysshe so strongly enarmyd wyth 
scalys on the body.” The chub was called skelly in 
Cumberland, on account of its large scales, and pollarde 
in other places. The chief peculiarity about this fish is 
the roundness of the head and the width of the mouth. 
