"HOGS NORTON, WHERE PIGS PLAY UPON THE ORGANS."
I should be much obliged by any of your correspondents favouring me with their opinions as to the origin of the above saying. Evans, in his Leicestershire Words, says:
"The true name of the town, according to Peck, is Hocks Norton, but vulgarly pronounced Hogs Norton. The organist to this parish church was named Piggs."
But in Witt's Recreations, of which I have a copy of 1640, the eighty-third epigram is "upon pigs devouring a bed of penny-royal, commonly called organs:"
"A good wife once, a bed of organs set,
The pigs came in, and eat up every whit;
The goodman said, Wife, you your garden may
Hogs Norton call, here pigs on organs play."
Organs from "organy;" French, origan; Latin, origanum.
Now it is evident that in 1640 the proverb was in vogue, and well understood; but organs were not at that time common in churches, especially parish churches, and as I do not know which of the many Nortons in England is Mr. Peck's Hocks Norton, I cannot help considering his derivation somewhat in the light of an anachronism.
I do not know the date of Howell's English Proverbs quoted by Mr. Halliwell in his Archaic Dictionary. Should there be such a place as Hog's Norton, or Hock's Norton, is the Hock = Hok = oak tree? Acorns and pigs were common associates.
The only instance that I recollect of pigs being connected with an organ, is in that curious freak recorded of the Abbé Debaigne, maître de musique to Louis XI., when he made a hog-organ by enclosing pigs of various ages and pitches of voice in a kind of chest; the older ones on the left hand for the bass, and the younger on the right for the treble: over all these was suspended a key-board, which, when played on, pressed long needles into the pigs' backs,—the result is left to the imagination.
THOS. LAWRENCE.