"Payed for a frountlet lost in a wager to my Lady Margaret, iiijli.
"Item, payed for a brekefast lost at bolling by my Lady Mary's Grace, xs."
GIVING DOLES.
A bishop of Durham, in the reign of Edward III, had every week eight quarters of wheat made into bread for the poor, besides his alms-dishes, fragments from his table, and money given away by him in journeys. The bishop of Ely, in 1532, fed daily at his gates two hundred poor persons, and the Lord Cromwell fed the same number. Edward, earl of Derby, fed upwards of sixty aged poor, besides all comers, thrice a week, and furnished, on Good Friday, two thousand seven hundred people with meat, drink, and money. Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, gave, besides the daily fragments of his house, on Fridays and Sundays, to every beggar that came to his door, a loaf of bread of a farthing value; in time of dearth he thus gave away five thousand loaves, and this charity is said to have cost his lordship five hundred pounds a year. Over and above this he gave on every festival day one hundred and fifty pence to as many poor persons, and he used to send daily meat, drink, and bread unto such as by age and sickness were not able to fetch alms from his gate; he also sent money, meat, apparel, &c., to such as he thought wanted the same, and were ashamed to beg; and, above all, this princely prelate was wont to take compassion upon such as were by misfortune decayed, and had fallen from wealth to poor estate. Such acts deserve to be written in letters of gold.
FEMALE ORNAMENT OF THE IRON PERIOD.
One of the most beautiful neck ornaments of the Teutonic or Iron Period ever found in Scotland is a beaded torc, discovered by a labourer while cutting turf in Lochar Moss, Dumfriesshire, about two miles to the north of Cumlongan Castle; and exhibited by Mr. Thomas Gray, of Liverpool, at the York meeting of the Archæological Institute. We here annex an engraving of it. The beads, which measure rather more than an inch in diameter, are boldly ribbed and grooved longitudinally. Between every two ribbed beads there is a small flat one formed like the wheel of a pulley, or the vertebral bone of a fish. The portion which must have passed round the nape of the neck is flat and smooth on the inner edge, but chased on the upper side in an elegant incised pattern corresponding to the ornamentation already described as characteristic of this period, and bearing some resemblance to that on the beautiful bronze diadem found at Stitchel in Roxburghshire, figured on a subsequent page. The beads are disconnected, having apparently been strung upon a metal wire, as was the case in another example found in the neighbourhood of Worcester. A waved ornament, chased along the outer edge of the solid piece, seems to have been designed in imitation of a cord; the last tradition, as it were, of the string with which the older necklace of shale or jet was secured. Altogether this example of the class of neck ornaments, to which Mr. Birch has assigned the appropriate name of beaded torcs, furnishes an exceedingly interesting illustration of the development of imitative design, in contradistinction to the more simple and archaic funicular torc, which, though continued in use down to a later period, pertains to the epoch of primitive art.
CURIOUS LANTERN.
In 1602, it is related that Sir John Harrington, of Bath, sent to James VI King of Scotland, at Christmas, for a new year's gift, a dark lantern. The top was a crown of pure gold, serving also to cover a perfume pan; within it was a shield of silver, embossed, to reflect the light; on one side of which were the sun, moon, and planets, and on the other side, the story of the birth and passion of Christ, as it was engraved by David II King of Scotland, who was a prisoner at Nottingham. On this present, the following passage was inscribed in Latin—"Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."