[44] Raine’s St. Cuthbert, p. 196.
Of such head-bands we have one at number [8569], p. 217, and other three mentioned upon [p. 221]. They are, no doubt, the old snôd of the Anglo-Saxon period. For high-born dames they were wrought of silk and gold; those of lower degree wore them of simpler stuff. The silken snood, affected to the present hour by young unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful witness to the fashion in vogue during Anglo-Saxon and later times in this country.
With regard to what John Garland says of stoles so made, there is one here, [No. 1233], p. 24, quite entire.
From what has been here brought forward, it will be seen that of silk, whence it came or what was its kind, nothing was truly understood, even by the learned, for many ages. While, then, we smile at Virgil and the other ancients for thinking that silk was a sort of herbaceous fleece growing upon trees, let us not forget that not so many years ago our own Royal Society printed a paper in which it is set forth that the yet-called Barnacle Goose comes from a mussel-like bivalve shell, known as the “Anatifa,” or Barnacle, an origin for the bird still believed in by some of our seafaring folks, and fostered after a manner by well-read people by the scientific nomenclature of the shell and the vernacular epithet for the goose. In the twelfth century, our countryman, Alexander Neckham, foster-brother to our Richard I., wrote of this marvel thus: “Ex lignis abiegnis salo diuturno tempore madefactis originem sumit avis quæ vulgo dicitur bernekke,” &c.[45] Such, however, was the Cirencester Augustinian friar’s knowledge of natural history, that, at least four hundred years ere the Royal Society had a being amongst us, he thus spurns the popular belief upon the subject:—
Ligna novas abiegna salo madefacta, jubente
Natura, volucres edere fama refert.
Id viscosus agit humor, quod publica fama
Afserit indignans philosophia negat.[46]
Of a truth the Record Commission is doing England good service by drawing out of darkness the works of our mediæval writers.
[45] De Natura Rerum, p. 99, published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls.