Now, as is wont, and ever to be given,
Hail to the memory of our friends in heaven!
Crispin and Crispianus—they, the two,
Who, like ourselves, have made the Boot and Shoe!"
The story as told in these verses is not exactly the same as the one current among the makers of the boot and shoe in our own island, an account in an old book called The History of the Gentle Craft (the production, no doubt, of the well-known Thomas Delony) being the basis of the tradition as received now by the British shoemaker. In the Golden Legende, one of the earliest of our printed books, and in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, as compiled from the Roman Martyrologies, as also in the inscriptions of some pieces of ancient tapestry formerly belonging to the shoemakers' chapel in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, but, when I saw them, in one of the galleries of the Louvre, is the like version as the one here given. The authority, too, of the Church Calendar of England, even as it still remains after the loppings of the Reformation, is another corroboration that Crispin and Crispianus, brothers, were early martyrs to the Christian faith, and through that chiefly honoured, and not because the one became a redoubted general and the other a successful suitor to the daughter of some all-potent emperor. In the Delony version—itself, in every probability, a borrowing from the popular mind of the Elizabethan period,—these things are put forth; while in trade paintings and songs the Prince Crispin is assumed to have a wife or sister, one can hardly tell which, in the person of a princess, the Princess Crispianus, and who figures as the patron of the women's branch of the shoemakers' art; Crispin himself presiding over the coarser labour for the rougher sex. This artifice, if not purely historical, is at least very excusable, because so natural, seeing that the duplex principle has such an extensive range; that even the feet themselves come into the world in pairs, and so shoes must be produced after the same fashion—paired, as the shoemakers have done by their adored Crispin and Crispianus.
It has now but to be stated that the writer of the foregoing lines (a long time now the common property of his fellow-workmen) and this present paragraph, has for many years contemplated the production of something, which might assume even the size of a book, in connexion with the various curious particulars which may be affiliated with this Crispin story, and therefore would be glad to find some of the numerous erudite renders of "N. & Q." helping his inquiries either through the medium of future Numbers, or as might be addressed privately to himself, care of Mr. Clements, bookseller, 22. Little Pulteney Street, Regent Street.
J. Davies Devlin.
Minor Queries.
Barrels Regiment.—I suppose that to this regiment a song refers which has for its burden,—