t vill; 3. attendance on the lord's court;
4. enjoyment of certain rights of common. It may be that neither the _fine_
nor the _vill_ forms a component part of the name; but K. need have no
scruple in believing that an abbreviated Latin or "legal term" (invented,
of course, by the stewards or bailiffs of the lord) may have become
naturalised among those of the inhabitants of the Moor whom it concerns.
The tenants or retainers of a manor have no alternative but to submit to
any generic name by which the steward may please to distinguish them. Thus
the "priors" and "censors" of Dartmoor forest are content to be called by
those names, because they were designated as "prehurdarii" and "censarii"
in the court rolls some hundred years ago. The tenants of a certain
lordship in Cornwall know and convey their tenements by the name of
_landams_ to this day, merely because the stewards two hundred years ago,
when the court rolls were in Latin, well knowing that _landa_ was the Latin
for _land_, and that transitive verbs in that language require an
accusative case, recorded each tenant as having taken of the lord "unam
landam, vocatam Tregollup," &c. Indeed so easily does a clipt exotic take
root and become acclimated among the peasantry of the Moor, whose powers of
appropriation are so much disparaged by the sceptical doubts of K., that
since the establishment of local courts the terms _fifa_ and _casa_ have
become familiar to them as household words and the name and uses of that
article of abbreviated Latinity called a '_bus_ are, as I am credibly
informed, not unknown to them.
E. SMIRKE.
* * * * *
Replies to Minor Queries.
_Newburgh Hamilton_ (Vol. iii, p. 117).--In Thomas Whincop's _List of
Dramatic Authors_, &c., the following notice of Hamilton occurs:--
"Mr. Newburgh Hamilton.
A Gentleman, who I think was related to, at least lived in the family
of Duke _Hamilton_; he wrote two Plays, called
I. _The Doating Lovers_, or _The Libertine Tam'd_; a Comedy acted at
the Theatre in _Lincoln's Inn_-_Fields_, in the year 1715, with no
success: but supported to the third night, for the Author's Benefit;
when the Boxes and Pit were laid together at the unusual Price of six
Shillings each Ticket.
II. _The Petticoat Plotter_; a Comedy of two Acts, performed at the
Theatre Royal in _Drury-Lane_."
T. C. T.
_Pedigree of Owen Glendower_ (Vol. iii.,
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