vicar of St. Thomas of Exeter, a leader among the Cornish insurgents in 1549:—
"This man," says Holinshed, "had many good things in him. He was of no great stature, but well set, and mightilie compact. He was a very good wrestler; shot well, both in the long-bow, and also in the cross-bow; he handled his hand-gun and peece very well; he was a very good woodman, and a hardie, and such a one as would not give his head for the polling, or his beard for the washing. He was a companion in any exercise of activitie, and of a courteous and gentle behaviour. He descended of a good honest parentage, being borne at Peneverin, in Cornwall; and yet, in this rebellion, an arch-captain, and a principal doer." —Vol. iv. p. 958, 4to edition. This model of clerical talents had the misfortune to be hanged upon the steeple of his own church,'—Scott.
'The reader,' Lockhart adds, 'needs hardly to be reminded of Ivanhoe.'
l. 349. Cp. Chaucer's friar in Prologue, l. 240:—
He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,' &c.
The character and adventures of Friar John owe something both to the 'Canterbury Tales' and to a remarkable poem, probably Dunbar's, entitled 'The Friars of Berwick.'
l. 354. St. Bede's day in the Calendar is May 27. See below, l. 410.
Stanza XXII. l. 372. tables, backgammon.
l. 387. fay = faith, word of honour. See below 454, and cp. Hamlet, ii. 2. 271, 'By my fay, I cannot reason.'
Stanza XXIII. l, 402. St. James or Santiago of Spain. Cp. 'Piers the Plowman,' i, 48 (with Prof. Skeat's note), Chaucer's Prologue, 465, and Southey's 'Pilgrim to Compostela,' valuable both for its poetic beauty and its ample notes. In regard to the cockleshell, Southey gives some important information in extracts from 'Anales de Galicia,' and he says—
That of the bearer's line. Some one, in former days, hath been
To Santiago's shrine.'
l. 403. Montserrat, a mountain, with a Benedictine abbey on it, in Catalonia. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood cherish a myth to the effect that the fantastic peaks and gorges of the mountain were formed at the Crucifixion.
ll. 404-7. Scott annotates as follows:—
