In course of time like boss, Dutch baas, knob seems to have been applied generally to mean a lord or master, and the Londoner who takes an agreeable interest in the “nobs”[602](and occasional snobs) riding in Hyde Park is possibly following an ancestral custom dating from the time when the Ring was originally constructed. Apsley House, now standing at the east end of Rotten Row, occupies the site of the park ranger’s lodge, the Ranger was a highly important personage, and it is not improbable that the site of Apsley House was once known as Ap’s lea or meadow. The immediately adjacent Stanhope Gate and Stanhope Street, or Stanhope in Durham, may mark the site of a stone hippa or horse similar to the famous stone horse in Brittany upon which—I believe to this day—women superstitiously seat themselves with the same purpose as they sit upon the Brahan stone in Ireland: Bryanstone Square in London is not more than a mile from Stanhope Street and Apsley House.
Fig. 320.—La Venus de Quinipily, near Baud Morbihan, Brittany. From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).
The Breton statue of Quinipily may be deemed a portrait of holy Queen Ip, and Gwennap, near Redruth, where is a famous amphitheatre, was probably a Queen Hip lea or seat of the same Queen’s worship.
Gwen Ap was presumably the same as Queen Aph or Godiva, the Lady of the White Horse, and Godrevy on the opposite side of St. Ives Bay may be equated with Good rhi Evy, or Good Queen Evie. A few miles from Liskeard there is a village named St. Ive, which the natives pronounce St. Eve: the more western, better-known Saint Ive’s, is mentioned in a document of 1546 as “Seynt Iysse,” and what apparently is this same dedication reappears at a place four miles west of Wadebridge termed St. Issey. “Whose name is it,” inquires W. C. Borlase, “that the parish of St. Issey bears?” He suggests somewhat wildly that it may be the same as Elidius, corrupted to Liddy, Ide, or Idgy, endeavouring to prove that this Elidius is the same as the great Welsh Teilo.
It would be simpler and more reasonable to assume that St. Issey is a trifling corruption of “Eseye,” which was one of the titles of the old British Mother of Life. The goddess Esseye—alternatively and better known as Keridwen—is described by Owen in his Cambrian Biography as “a female personage, in the mythology of the Britons considered as the first of womankind, having nearly the same attributes with Venus, in whom are personified the generative powers”.
With Eseye and with St. Issey, alias St. Ive, may be connoted the deserted town of Hesy in Judea: on the mound now known as Tell el Hesy, or the hill town of Hesy, the remains of at least eight super-imposed prehistoric cities have been excavated, and among the discoveries on this site was a limestone lampstand subscribed on the base Aphebal.[603] The winged maiden found at the same time is essentially Cretan, and it is not an unreasonable assumption that on this Aphe fragment of pottery from Hesy we have a contemporary portrait of the Candian Aphaia or Britomart, alias Hesy, or St. Issy, or St. Ive: the British Eseye was alternatively known as Cendwen.
Fig. 321.—From A Mound of Many Cities (Bliss, J. B.).