Unicorn.
Minor Queries Answered.
Smyth's MSS. relating to Gloucestershire.—In Rudder's History of Gloucestershire, title "Nibley," p. 575., is the following passage:
"John Smyth, of Nibley, ancestor to the present proprietor, was very eminent for his great assiduity in collecting every kind of information respecting this county and its inhabitants. He wrote the Genealogical History of the Berkeley Family, in three folio MSS., which Sir William Dugdale abridged and published in his Baronage of England. In three other folio MSS. he has registered with great exactness the names of the lords of manors in the county in the year 1608, the number of men in each parish able to bear arms, with their names, age, stature, professions, armour, and weapons. The sums each landholder paid to subsidies granted in a certain year are set down in another MS. He likewise committed to writing a very particular account of the customs of the several manors in the hundred of Berkeley, and the pedigrees of their respective lords. These and some other MSS., which cost him forty years in compiling, are now (1779) in the possession of Nicholas Smyth, Esq., the fifth from him in lineal descent."
I shall feel much obliged to any of your readers who will inform me where these MSS., or any of them, may now be seen. Those that I particularly want to inspect are printed in Italics in the above quotation.
Julius Partrige.
Birmingham.
[Atkyns, in his Gloucestershire, p. 579., states that Smythe's MSS. were at the time he wrote, A.D. 1712, in the custody of his great-grandson, Sir George Smith, who generously communicated them to all that desired a perusal of them. Fosbrooke, however, in the preface to his History of Gloucestershire, published in 1807, speaks of them as being in the possession of the Earl of Berkeley. He says, "Of the noblemen and gentlemen who honoured me with support and information, the Earl of Berkeley's permission to use Mr. Smythe's MSS. in every important extent has been of essential service." Fosbrooke subsequently published, in 1821, a quarto volume of Abstracts and Extracts of Smythe's Lives of the Berkeleys from these manuscripts.]
Origin of Terms in Change-ringing.—I shall be obliged by any one informing me as to the origin and derivation of the terms "plain bob," "grandsire bob," "single bob minor," "grandsire treble," "caters," "cinques," et hoc genus omne, so well known to campanologists.