Sir R. Haigh's Letter-book (Vol. i, p. 463.).—This is incorrect; no such person is known. The baronet intended is Sir Roger Bradshaigh, of Haigh; a very well-known person, whose funeral sermon was preached by Wroe, the warden of Manchester Collegiate Church, locally remembered as "silver-mouthed Wroe."
This name is correctly given in Puttick and Simpson's Catalogue of a Miscellaneous Sale on April 15, and it is to be hoped that Sir Roger's collection of letters, ranging from 1662 to 1676, may have fallen into the hands of the noble earl who represents him, the present proprietor of Haigh.
Chethamensis.
Marescautia (Vol. i., p. 94.).—Your correspondent requests some information as to the meaning of the word "marescautia." Mareschaucie, in old French, means a stable. Pasquier (Recherches de la France, l. viii. ch. 2.) says,—
"Pausanias disoit que Mark apud Celtas signifioit un cheual ... je vous diray qu'en ancien langage allemant Mark se prenoit pour un cheual."
In ch. 54. he refers to another etymolygy of "maréchal," from "maire," or "maistre," and "cheval," "comme si on les eust voulu dire maistre de la cheualerie." "Maréchal" still signifies "a farrier." Maréchaussée was the term applied down to the Revolution to the jurisdiction of Nosseigneurs les Maréchaux de France, whose orders were enforced by a company of horse that patrolled the highways, la chaussée, generally raised above the level of the surrounding country. Froissart applies the term to the Marshalsea prison in London. In D.S.'s first entry there may, perhaps, be some allusion to another meaning of the word, namely, that of "march, limit, boundary."
What the nature of the tenure per serjentiam marescautiæ may be I am not prepared to say. May it not have had some reference to the support of the royal stud?
J.B.D.
Memoirs of an American Lady (Vol. i., p. 335.).—If this work cannot now be got it is a great pity,—it ought to go down to posterity; a more valuable or interesting account of a particular state of society now quite extinct, can hardly be found. Instead of saying that "it is the work of Mrs. Grant, the author of this and that," I should say of her other books that they were written by the author of the Memoirs of an American Lady. The character of the individual lady, her way of keeping house on a large scale, the state of the domestic slaves, threatened, as the only known punishment and most terrible to them, with being sold to Jamaica; the customs of the young men at Albany, their adventurous outset in life, their practice of robbing one another in joke (like a curious story at Venice, in the story-book called Il Peccarone, and having some connection with the stories of the Spartan and Circassian youth), with much of natural scenery, are told without pretension of style; but unluckily there is too much interspersed relating to the author herself, then quite young.
C.B.