Tor-Mohun.
Aldress (Vol. v., p. 582.).—Your correspondent Cowgill gives an instance of the use of this obsolete word in an epitaph in St. Stephen's, Norwich, and asks where else it may be met with. I have just found it in a manuscript diary, under date 1561, and also as used in the same city:
"A Speech made after Mr. Mayor Mingay's Dinner.
"Master Mayor of Norwich; an it please your worship you have feasted us like a kinge. God bless the Queen's grace. We have fed plentifully, and now whilom I can speak plain English, I heartily thank you Master Mayor, and so do we all. Answer, boys, answer! Your beere is pleasant and potent, and soon catches us by the caput and stops our manners, and so Huzza for the Queen's Majesty's Grace, and all her bonny brow'd dames of honour! Huzza for Master Mayor and our good dame Mayoress, the Alderman and his faire Aldress; there they are, God save them and all this jolly company. To all our friends round country who have a penny in their purse, and an English heart in their bodies, to keep out Spanish Dons and Papists with their faggots to burn our whiskers. Shove it about. Twirl your cup-cases, handle your jugs, and huzza for Master Mayor and his good dame!"
How long is it since the ladies of our civic dignitaries relinquished the distinction here given to one of their order? What was the cup-case?
Charles Reid.
Paternoster Row.
Huggins and Muggins (Vol. viii., p. 341.).—In the edition of Mallet's Northern Antiquities, edited by J. A. Blackwell, Esq., and published by Bohn (Antiquarian Library, 1847), the following conjectural etymology of the words Huggins and Muggins is given by the editor in a note on the word Muninn, in the glossary to the Prose Edda:
"We cannot refrain for once from noticing the curious coincidence between the names of Odin's ravens, Hugin and Munin—Mind and Memory—and those of two personages who figure so often in our comic literature as Messrs. Huggins and Muggins. Huggins, like Hugh, appears to have the same root as Hugin, viz. hugr, mind, spirit; and as Mr. Muggins is as invariably associated with Mr. Huggins, as one of Odin's ravens was with the other (as mind is with memory), the name may originally have been written Munnins, and nn changed into gg for the sake of euphony. Should this conjecture, for it is nothing else, be well founded, one of the most poetical ideas in the whole range of mythology would, in this plodding, practical, spilling-jenny age of ours, have thus undergone a most singular metamorphosis."
Jno. N. Radcliffe.
Dewsbury.