DUKE OF EXETER’S DAUGHTER, a nickname applied to a 15th-century instrument of torture resembling the rack (q.v.). Blackstone says (Commentaries, ii. sec. 326): “The trial by rack is utterly unknown to the law of England, though once when the dukes of Exeter and Suffolk, and other ministers of Henry VI., had laid a design to introduce the civil (i.e. Roman) law into the kingdom as the rule of government, for a beginning thereof they erected a rack for torture, which was called in derision the duke of Exeter’s daughter, and still remains in the Tower of London, where it was used as an engine of state, not of law, more than once in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. But when, upon the assassination of Villiers, duke of Buckingham, by Felton, it was proposed in the privy council to put the assassin to the rack, in order to discover his accomplices, the judges being consulted, declared unanimously that no such proceeding was allowable by the laws of England.”
DUKER, CARL ANDREAS (1670-1752), German classical scholar and jurist, was born at Unna in Westphalia. He studied at the university of Franeker under Jacob Perizonius. In 1700 he was appointed teacher of history and eloquence at the Herborn gymnasium, in 1704 vice-principal of the school at the Hague, and in 1716 he succeeded (with Drakenborch as colleague) to the professorship formerly held by Peter Burmann at Utrecht. After eighteen years’ tenure he resigned his post, and lived in retirement at Ysselstein and Vianen. His health finally broke down under excessive study, and he died, almost blind, at the house of a relative in Meiderich near Duisburg, on the 5th of November 1752. His chief classical works were editions of Florus (1722) and Thucydides (1731, considered his best). He brought out the 2nd edition of Perizonius’s Origines Babylonicae et Aegyptiacae (1736) and his commentary on Pomponius Mela (1736-1737). Duker was also an authority on ancient law, and published Opuscula varia de latinitate veterum jurisconsultorum (1711), and a revision of the Leges Atticae of S. Petit (1741).
See C. Saxe, Onomasticon litterarium, vi. 267; articles in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie and in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopadie.
DUKERIES, THE, a name given to a district in the N.W. of Nottinghamshire, England; included within the ancient Sherwood Forest (q.v.). The name is taken from the existence of several adjacent demesnes of noblemen, and the character of the Forest is to some extent preserved here. On the north is the Sheffield-Retford branch of the Great Central railway, serving the town of Worksop, connecting at Retford with the Great Northern railway, while on the south the Great Central railway serves the small market town of Ollerton, and connects with the Great Northern at Dukeries Junction. The following demesnes are comprised in the district. Worksop Manor formerly belonged to the dukes of Norfolk. Welbeck Abbey is the seat of the dukes of Portland, to whom it came from the Cavendish family (dukes of Newcastle); the mansion is mainly classic in style, dating from the early 17th century, but with many subsequent additions; the fifth duke of Portland (d. 1879) built the curious series of subterranean corridors and chambers beneath the grounds. Clumber House, the seat of the dukes of Newcastle, is beautifully placed above a lake in a fine park. Thoresby House is the seat of the earls Manvers, to whom it came on the extinction of the dukedom of Kingston; part of this demesne is a splendid tract of wild woodland.
DUKES, LEOPOLD (1810-1891), Hungarian critic of Jewish literature. He spent about twenty years in England, and from his researches in the Bodleian library and the British Museum (which contain two of the most valuable Hebrew libraries in the world) Dukes was able to complete the work of Zunz (q.v.). The most popular work of Dukes was his Rabbinische Blumenlese (1844), in which he collected the rabbinic proverbs and illustrated them from the gnomic literatures of other peoples. Dukes made many contributions to philology, but his best work was connected with the medieval Hebrew poetry, especially Ibn Gabirol.
(I. A.)