n s. v. MAY 11, 1912.] NOTES AND QUERIES,
371
3. Bacon's ' County Atlas ' now comes in.
" Osraunderleye " occurs in the Inquisitiones
in the company of thirteen other places.
I look up these places in Bacon's index,
and fail with most of them. But " Welle-
bery " is obviously Welbury, which I find
to be about five miles from Osmotherley.
I think this will do. It took me about half
an hour. WALTER W. SKEAT.
In John Ecton's ' Thesaurus Rerum Ecclesiasticarum,' 1742, p. 677, is the follow- ing :
" Osmotherley V. [St. Peter] alias Osmonderley, in Alvertonshire, (of exempt Jurisdiction.) Por- tionar. sive Preb. Propr. Bishop of Durham."
The amount under " King's Books " is 121, Is., and that under " Yearly Tenths " 12s. It is one of the " Livings Discharged," i.e., from the payment of First -Fruits and Tenths, in the " Arch-Deaconry of Cleave- land," in the Diocese of York.
J. Adams, in his ' Index Villaris,' 1680, gives two parishes rated in the " King's Book " at Osmotherley in the Hundred of Allerton one a vicarage, the other a rectory rated respectively at SI. 10s. and 61. He also gives Osmotherley in Lancashire, in the Hundred of Loynsdale.
Gough's Camden's 'Britannia,' 1789, iii. 83, says :
" At Osmotherley, near North Allerton, was a collegiate church, or a rectory, divided into three portions. Near it Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey, earl of Kent, and lord of Wake, founded a Carthusian priory 20 Richard II., but dying shortly after in arms against Henry IV. the work stopt till Henry VI. confirmed his grants 1440. It was valued at 323Z. per annum."
Alvertonshire, commonly called North
Alerton (sic), was a small tract watered by
the little river Wiske, and taking its name
from the town of North Alverton (ibid., p. 20).
ROBERT PIERPOINT.
Is not this a sixteenth-century spelling of Osmotherley, a parish town in the wapentake of Allertonshire, near Northallerton, N. Riding, Yorkshire ? The prebendary of Osmotherley is mentioned in records of the time of Edward I. Langdale, in his ' Topog. Diet, of Yorkshire,' says :
" Some have thought this to have been a collegiate church ; but it seems rather to have been a rectory, divided into three distinct parts or portions, and it is so rated in the Lincoln taxation. But it was afterwards of three sinecure portions, and a vicar endowed. Yet in the Arch- bishop's certificate of all hospitals, colleges, &c., anno 37 Hen. VIII., there is 'the three prebends simpters within the parish church of Osmotherley, the yearly value 181.' Tanner (? ' Notitia Mon- astica ')."
There is another town of Osmotherly
(without the e) in East Lancashire.
J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL. 26, Auriol Road, W. Kensington.
This is Osmotherley in Yorkshire. The rectory of the church was appropriated to three portionaries or prebendaries. About 1536 these were Richard Hilliard, Thomas Duke, and Thomas Chamber (see ' Valor Eccles.,' v. 88). J. B.
Your correspondent will find an interesting article on this church, with a copy of a brass to John Moore, one of the prebendaries, in The Reliquary, October, 1893, by Bishop Mitchinson and the editor. F. R. F.
AUTHORS OR EXPLANATIONS WANTED
(11 S. v. 230, 336). 2. The " Grand Seignior "
is the Sultan of Turkey, " Tyrannus Turci-
cus " in Merry weather's Latin rendering of
the ' Religio Medici,' and " 1'Empereur des
Turcs " in the French translation of 1668.
Neither Moltke nor Greenhill has a note
on the passage. Can any one say of which
Sultan the story was told ? There is a
curious parallel in Dickens's ' Uncommercial
Traveller,' chap, xi., where a tramp is warned
by a beadle to leave the town :
li ' Why, blow your little town ! ' I ses, ' who wants to be in it ? Wot does your dirty little town mfan by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to anywhere ? Why don't you get a shovel and a barrer, and clear your town out o' people's way ? ' '
3. English writers of the seventeenth century were so frequently indebted in detail to Latin literature that one may be justified in suggesting that when Fuller was comparing blasphemy in wit to the backbone in a lamprey, the removal of which makes the flesh more palatable, he was influenced by a passage in Plautus's ' Aulularia,' 395-6 (II. Lx. 1) :
Tu, Machaerio, Congrum muraenam exdorsua, quantum potest.
Cf. Terence, ' Adelphi,' 377-8 (III. iii. 23). Paulus Jovius, in chap. xxxi. of his 'De Piscibus ' (a book read by Robert Burton), tells us that a friend, when fishing, explained to him that the ancients used to " bone " lampreys, in order that the absence of bones might make them better eating, and gave him an ocular demonstration of how to do it. 0. Quantulacumque estis, vos ego magna voco, is from Ovid, ' Amores,' 3, 15, 14, where the words are supposed to be addressed to the
