Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/334

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326


NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. VIIL OCT. 19, 1901.


scription of the antiquities contained in this museum? A friend writing to me from Switzerland, after a visit to the hospitable monks of Mont St. Bernard, says of it :

" I wish somebody would write a paper on the contents of this museum. You have flint arrow- heads, pots with cremated bones, Roman re- mains in an endless variety ; statues, inscriptions, weapons, inscribed tablets, safety pins, and a large assortment of coins. As the bulk of these have been found in or near the pass during the last 200 years, the ensemble is vastly interesting."

W. S. B. H.

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED.

They lie in yonder churchyard

At rest and so are we.

Shapes of a dream.

Word-catchers who live on syllables.

Give sorrow vent.

(.Probably a mistake for " Give sorrow words " ' Macbeth/]

To rally life's whole energies to die.

Severe and beautiful.

Now Sirius rages.

With Tartar faces thronged and horrent uniforms.

A. E. S.


ST. CLEMENT DANES. (9 th S. vii. 64, 173, 274, 375 ; viii. 17, 86, 186.)

THE object of H.'s argument, if I under- stand it rightly, is to show that although this church was named after " San Clemente, the Northman's church at Rome," yet no Danish colony existed in its neighbourhood. But H. has failed to meet my assertion that we know of no church dedicated to St. Clement, ex- cept that in the Strand, which received the appellation of "Dacorum" or " Danorum," and hp has apparently overlooked the record evidence which I cited in my first note on the subject (9 th S. vii. 65), and which to my mind conclusively proves the presence of Danes in the vicinity of the church.

The long list of names ending in -wick and -ey does not seem to me very relevant to the subject. But even on this point I am not correctly quoted. H. says that if "CoL. PRIDEAUX can prove his case that the name of Wych Street was derived from Aldewych, this would be an important proof of the

B-esence of a Danish colony near St. Clement anes." I endeavoured to prove no case of the kind. H. had asserted that " it would be hard to find the specifically Danish termina- tion of -wichin T any place-name of the Thames Valley above London Bridge." In disproof of this statement, I pointed out that the village which lay between St. Clement's


Church and St. Giles's Hospital was known as early as the time of Henry III. as " Alde- wych " (Hardy and Page's * Feet of Fines for Middlesex,' i. 13), and I observed obiter that " the second syllable is supposed by many topographers to be responsible for Wych Street." H. further remarks that "CoL. PRIDEAUX will doubtless allow that 'Ald- wych ' may be simply a translation of * Vetus View,' a British settlement on the road from Thorney to London." I am quite willing to admit that "Aldwych" may be represented in Latin by " Vetus Vicus," but I have never met with any documentary evidence of that form, and the notion that Aldwich was a British settlement, so far as I know, rests on no foundation whatever. What we do know is that the termination -wich or -wick is not a native English word, and that the A.-S. wlc, a dwelling, from which it is derived, is merely borrowed from the Latin uicus, a village. The name of Aldwych certainly presupposes an ancient settlement, but the hypothesis that it was British appears to me to have no bearing on the real question at issue.

Another incidental point which has been raised by H. is with regard to the Teutonic settlement in the Crimea. He still seems to think that the settlers were of Low German or Scandinavian stock, notwithstanding the evidence I produced to show that they were in all probability High Germans. I will say no more on this question, except to express the wish that Prof. Skeat would overhaul the list of words drawn up by Busbecq, and would give the readers of ' N. & Q.' the benefit of his views on that interesting subject. W. F. PRIDEAUX.

MR. HARRISON may like to know: 1. That I am quite aware -ivich, -wyck, or -wick may derive either from the Latin vicus or the Scandinavian mk (bay), and that the termi- nation of Droitwich in Worcestershire or Eaton Wick (Bucks) has not the same mean- ing as that of Wick (Caithness), Ipswich (Suffolk), or Smerwick Bay (Kerry), the only -ivick I can find in Ireland.

2. Osgood Clapa, the eponymus of Clapham, is usually called a Dane, and I confess that in calling Clapham Danish I was thinking mainly of the extremely defensible nature of the -ham named from him, rather than of that " ham " itself, as my argument was running chiefly on topographical grounds.

3. I do not profess to be a Scandinavian scholar, so as to distinguish between Norse, Icelandic, and Danish words, but in using the word Danish I sinned in COL. PRIDEAUX'S