national peculiarity. The Emperor of Cyprus thus contemptuously dismisses some messengers of Richard's:
"Out taylards of my paleys!
Now go and say your tayled king
That I owe him no thing!"
"A taylard," Mr. Skeat assures us, is a man with a tail; the tailed king is Richard the First himself! Fuller[1] refers to Matthew Paris, who relates that when Robert, brother of St. Louis of France, came to high words with William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, in Palestine, the Frenchman insulted our nation by exclaiming, "O timidorum caudatorum formidolositas! quàm beatus, quàm mundus præsens foret exercitus, si à caudis purgaretur et caudatis: the cowardliness of these fearful Longtails! How happie, how cleane would this our Armie be were it but purged from Tails and Longtails!" The Earl retorted, "The son of my father shall press thither to-day whither you shall not dare approach his horse-tail."
Liberty in connection with Kent has, I suppose, the same reference as the "Invicta" on the county banner, which a correspondent of Notes and Queries[2] suggests was conceded by the Conqueror "to perpetuate the memory of the brave stand made by the men of West Kent against him on his entering their county near Blackheath, and granted to them as a condition of their peaceful submission to him as their future king, by which submission, not conquest, they preserved inviolate the Saxon laws and customs of Kent, which no other county in the kingdom enjoys, and which are retained by their children to this day."
What Sussex (2) and Surrey (3) have specially to do with Logs I do not know, perhaps they may have had a high repute for firewood; at any rate Logs is an unexceptionable rhyme for Hogs, and by its means we are introduced to the blazon of Hampshire (4). To call a
- ↑ Worthies, vol. i. p. 538.
- ↑ 3rd S. vol. viii. p. 92. See Drayton's Battle of Agincourt [i. 17]:
"First in the Kentish streamer was a wood
Out of whose top an arm that held a sword
As their right emblem; and to make it good,
They above other only had a word,
Which was, UNCONQUERED, as that freest had stood."
