Notes and Queries, Number 41, August 10, 1850 | Page 3

one could maintain that Gascoigne was ever Chief Justice to Hen. V., with two existing records before him, both containing conclusive proof to the contrary.
The first is the entry on the Issue Roll of July, 1413, of a payment made of an arrear of Gascoigne's salary and pension, in which he is called "late Chief Justice of the Bench of _Lord Henry, father of the present King_."
The second is the inscription on his monument in Harwood Church in Yorkshire, where he is described as "nuper capit. justio. de banco Hen. nuper regis angli? quarti."
I think I may fairly ask whether it is possible to suppose that in either of these records, particularly {163} the latter, he would have been docked his title, had he ever been Chief Justice of the reigning king?
Allow me to take this opportunity of thanking L.B.L. for his extracts from the Hospitaller's Survey (Vol. ii., p. 123.), which are most interesting, and, to use a modern word, very suggestive.
Edward Foss.
Street-End House, near Canterbury.
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AN OLD GUY?
No one would at present think of any other answer to a Query as to the meaning of this term than that the phrase originated with the scarecrows and stuffed apings of humanity with which the rising generation enlivens our streets on every fifth of November, and dins in our ears the cry, "Please to remember the guy," and that it alludes to the Christian name of the culprit, Guido. Have, however, any of your readers met this title, or any allusion to it, in any writer previously to 1605? and may its attribution to the supposed framer of the Gunpowder Plot only have been the accidental appropriation of an earlier term of popular reproach, and which had become so since the conversion of the nation to Christianity? This naturally heaped contumely and insult upon every thing relating to the Druids, and the heathen superstitions of the earlier inhabitants.
Amongst others, Guy was a term by which, no doubt, the Druids were very early designated, and is cognate, with the Italian Guido and our own _Guide_, to the Latin _cuidare_, which would give it great appropriativeness when applied to the offices of teachers and leaders, with which these lordly flamens were invested. Narrowly connected with their rites, the term has descended to the present day, as is decidedly shown in the French name of the mistletoe, _le Gui_, and as denoting the priesthood. The common cry of the children at Christmas in France, _au gui l'an neuf_, marks the winter solstice, and their most solemn festival; so _ai-guil-lac_, as the name of new year's gifts, so necessary and expensive to a Frenchman, which they particularly bear in the diocese of Chartres, can only be explained by referring it to the same origin. In the French vocabulary at present this word, as I have before observed, is restricted to the mistletoe, the viscum album of Linn?us: but in Germany we have pretty much the same conversion of a favourite druidical plant, the trefoil, or shamrock, and the cinquefoil; both of them go in Bavaria and many other parts of Germany under the name of _Truten-fuss_, or Druid's foot, and are thought potent charms in guarding fields and cattle from harm; but there too, as with us, possibly the oldest title of guy, the term Druid, has grown into a name of the greatest disgrace: "_Trute, Trute, Saudreck_," "Druid, Druid, sow dirt," is an insulting phrase reserved for the highest ebullitions of a peasant's rage in Schwaben and Franken.
Whilst on the subject of the mistletoe, I cannot forbear to mark the coincidences that run through the popular notions of a country in all ages. Pliny, in his very exact account of the druidical rites, tells us, when the archdruid mounted the oak to cut the sacred parasite with a golden pruning-hook, two other priests stood below to catch it in a white linen cloth, extremely cautious lest it should fall to earth. One is almost tempted to fancy that Shakspeare was describing a similar scene when he makes Hecate say
"Upon the corner of the moon, There hangs a vap'rous drop profound, I'll catch it ere it come to ground."
In a very excellent note to Dr. Giles' translation of Richard of Cirencester, p. 432., he adduces the opinion of Dr. Daubeny, of Oxford, that as the mistletoe is now so rarely found in Europe on oaks, it had been exterminated with the other druidical rites on the introduction of Christianity. I am not sufficiently botanist to determine how far it is possible to destroy the natural habitat of a plant propagated by extrinsic means, and should be more inclined to account for the difference then and now by supposing that the Druids may have known the secret of inoculating a desirable oak