Wyth clothes of golde, silke, and pepir black.
Hall, in his Chronicles, speaking of the Duke of Clarence ravaging the French coast in Henry IV.’s reign, says, ‘in his retournyng he encountred with two greate Carickes of Jeane laden with ryche marchandise.’ (f. xxiv.)
Its old rival upon the Adriatic still vies with it in ‘Veness,’ once enrolled as ‘de Venise.’ Rome has given us our early ‘Reginald le Romayns’ and ‘John le Romayns,’ whose descendants now write their names in the all but unaltered form of ‘Romaine,’[[141]] and to Lombardy and the Jews we owe Lombard street, and our ‘Lombards,’ ‘Lumbards,’ ‘Lubbards,’ and perhaps ‘Lubbers’—not to mention our ‘Luckes,’ and ‘Luckies,’ a progenitor of whom I find inscribed in the Hundred Rolls as ‘Luke of Lucca.’ Advancing eastwards, a ‘Martin le Hunne’ looks strangely as if sprung from a Hungarian source. Whatever doubt, however, there may be on this point, there can be none on ‘William le Turc,’[[142]] whose name is no solitary one in the records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and whose descendants are by no means extinct in the nineteenth. ‘Peter le Russe’ would seem at first sight to be of Russian origin, especially with such a Christian name to the fore as the one above, but it is far more probably one more form of the endless corruptions of ‘le Rous,’ a sobriquet of complexion so extremely familiar to all who have spent any time over mediæval registers. I have already mentioned ‘le Norrys’ as connected with our ‘Norris.’ ‘Dennis,’ I doubt not, in some cases, is equally representative of the former ‘le Daneys.’ Entries like ‘William le Norris,’ or ‘Walter le Norreis,’ or ‘Roger le Daneis,’ or ‘Joel le Deneys,’ are of constant occurrence. These, added to the others, may be mentioned as bringing before our eyes the broadest limits of European immigration, and with scarcely an exception they are found among the English surnames of to-day.
But we must not forget the Dutch—a term that once embraced all the German race.[[143]] ‘Dutchman,’ though I have found no instance in early rolls, is, I see, a denizen of our present directories, while ‘Dutchwomen,’ found in the fourteenth century, is extinct. Our ‘Pruces’ are but the old ‘le Pruce,’ or Prussian, as we should now term them. The word is met with in an old political song, and, as it contains a list of articles, the introduction of which into England from Flanders made the two countries so closely connected, I will quote it fully:—
Now beer and bacon bene fro Pruse i-brought
Into fflaunders, as loved and fere i-soughte;
Osmonde, coppre, bowstaffes, stile and wex,
Peltre-ware, and grey, pych, tar, borde, and flex,
And Coleyne threde, fustiane, and canvase,
Corde, bokeram, of old tyme thus it wase.