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of Wales, by her will in 1385, bequeathed to her son, Prince Richard, a new bed of red velvet, embroidered with ostrich feathers of silver, and leopards' heads of gold, with branches and sleeves of silver. Sir H. Nicolas proceeds with examples to the ostrich feathers borne by Arthur Prince of Wales, son of Henry VII.; and the feathers and motto, in a novel but picturesque form, as they occur on stained glass of the time of Henry VIII., in the Porter's Lodge, in the Tower of London.

The badge seems thenceforth to have been considered to belong exclusively to the Sovereign's eldest son; but Prince Edward (afterwards King Edward VI., but who was never Prince of Wales) used it in an unprecedented manner. In old St. Dunstan's Church, Fleet-street, were the arms of Henry VIII., having on the dexter side one of his badges; and on the other a roundel, per pale, sanguine, and azure, within a leaf composed of leaves and roses, and charged with the letters E. P. Between the letters was a plume of three ostrich feathers argent, penned, or, passing through a label inscribed Ich Dien, the feathers being surmounted by the Prince's coronet. Another, but somewhat similar example, occurs on a piece of glass which is supposed to have come from Reynold's Place, Horton Kirby, in Kent.

Henry, Prince of Wales, son of King James I., sometimes bore the feathers like his predecessor, Arthur Prince of Wales; and on other occasions he placed the feathers on a sun. Since that period the usual manner of bearing the feathers is as a plume encircled by a coronet; and from ignorance of the real character of this ancient and beautiful badge it has sometimes been considered as the crest of the Princes of Wales.

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Sir Harris says of the motto "Houmout,” sometimes erroneously printed "Houmont," that it is formed of the two old German words, Hoogh, moed,' ‘hoo moed,' or 'hoogh-moe'—i.e., magnanimous, highspirited, and was probably adopted to express the predominant quality of the Prince's mind.

In conclusion, Sir H. Nicolas repeats his opinion that there is no truth in the tradition which assigns the badge of the ostrich feathers to the battle of Cressy, or of Poictiers; and he is strongly impressed with the belief that it was derived, as well as the mottoes, from the house of Hainault, possibly from the Comté of Ostrevant, which formed the appanage of the eldest sons of the Counts of that province.

A piece of contemporary evidence is, by some, considered to have set the question at rest: this is a manuscript of John de Ardern, physician in the time of the Black Prince; and who distinctly states that the Prince derived the feathers from the blind King of Bohemia.

CHEVY CHASE, OR OTTERBOURNE ?

The famous ballad of " Chevy Chase" has lately been proved historically worthless. The two versions, the older and the more recent, agree in stating the facts as follows:-The combat took place at Otterbourne, and was occasioned by the Percy's vow to hunt the Cheviot in spite

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of Douglas. The result was indecisive, 1447 out of 1500 English bowmen being killed, and 1495 out of 2000 Scotch spearmen. Douglas was shot dead by an arrow; and Percy slain by a lance-thrust. The only battle that ever took place at all near Otterbourne was contested on the one side by Douglas, with 2000 foot and 300 lances; on the other, by Harry Hotspur and Ralph, sons of the Percy, commanding 8000 foot and 600 spears. It was occasioned by Northumberland sending his sons to encounter the two Scotch armies which had entered England. The English attacked the enemy's camp between Otterbourne and Newcastle, and were eventually routed with the loss of 1800 men, 1000 others being wounded. The invaders lost only 100 in killed, 200 in prisoners. Douglas was slain by a spearthrust, while Hotspur was captured. This brief summary of the fight, August 19, 1388, is from the very full narrative of Froissart, derived from two French knights who had served on the English side in the contest, and from a knight and two squires of Scotland, of the party of Earl Douglas.

It will thus be seen from this bare outline that the ballad consists of a pitifully-mangled account of the battle of Otterbourne; and the minstrel, besides openly mentioning this place as the scene, has so blended various incidents and names connected with that contest as to destroy all doubt on the subject. Nor was there any other occasion on which a Douglas was slain. Again, the composer places the event in the reign of Henry IV. and "Jamye, the Skottishe Kyng," and makes it immediately antecedent to Hombledon; but when Richard II. reigned in England the first" Jamye" was not born till ten years after, and Hombledon was not fought till 1402. The writer, therefore, must have lived a very long period subsequent to Otterbourne, or its chronicler, whose last stanza proves him to have composed his poem after 1403. The only reason for supposing a separate battle is the hunting party which gives name to the ballad; and this is conjectured to have arisen from Otterbourne being styled "The Battle of (the) Chevachées," that is, forays, raids over the border into an enemy's country, in one of which the Scots were engaged at this very time. The word occurs in Chaucer, during whose life Otterbourne was fought. It still exists in the French chevauchee, and our chivy.

What could be more natural than that the knightly class should style this "the Battle of (the) Chevachées," just as they spoke of the Battle of Spurs; and that the Saxon populace, ignorant of these long aristocratic French words, should construe the title into "Battle of (the) ChevyChase?"

Hence, then, in the belief of the writer, arose the idea that the battle of Otterbourne took place during a hunting expedition in Cheviot. The story itself furnishes corroborative testimony. The composer shows his ignorance by speaking of Otterbourne as in Cheviot, although at least a dozen miles distant. Nay, the very vow of Percy would have been unnecessary, or rather a proof of cowardice, for the Cheviots were no less Northumbrian than Scotch, Cheviot itself clearly appertaining to England rather than Scotland. This solution of what has long been a source

EARLS AND DUKES OF NORTHUMBERLAND.

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of serious difficulty to students of history and ballad literature, is condensed from an interesting communication to Notes and Queries, 3rd S., No. 294, by E. F. Nicholson, Tonbridge.

THE EARLS AND DUKES OF NORTHUMBERLAND. There was formerly in titled life as much peril as grandeur. Take, for instance, the eighteen Earls of Northumberland. The first three were slain; the fourth, Cospatrick, from whom the Dundases are descended, died in exile; the fifth was beheaded; the sixth, who was also Bishop of Durham (Walcher), was murdered; the seventh (the Norman Alberic) was deprived, and pronounced "unfit for the dignity"; the eighth died a prisoner for treason; the ninth and tenth hardly come into the account, for they were Henry and Malcolm, princes of Scotland, who were a sort of honorary Earls of Northumberland; the eleventh earl was the old Bishop Pudsey, of Durham, who bought the earldom for 11,000l., but was subsequently deprived of it and thrown into prison. Then came the Percys. The first earl of that house, but the twelfth in succession, after the death of his son, Hotspur, at Shrewsbury, was himself slain in battle; the thirteenth earl fell at St. Albans, the fourteenth at Towton, the fifteenth at Barnet, the sixteenth was murdered, the seventeenth was the first to die a natural death, and the eighteenth left no children. He, indeed, left a brother; but Sir Thomas Percy was attainted, and his honours became extinct. The son of Sir Thomas was restored in blood and title after Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was beheaded; but the restored earl was himself beheaded in 1572. It was his nephew, Earl Henry, the husband of Dorothy, one of the sisters of Essex, who suffered fifteen years' imprisonment in the Tower, and was mulcted in a fine of 20,000l., not so much because he failed to prove that he was not concerned in the Gunpowder Plot, as because the Percy who was actively engaged in it was his kinsman and servant. He was the last earl of his line who suffered personal constraint; and in his grandson, Josceline Percy, the male line became extinct, in 1670.

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The Earl Josceline's sole child and heiress, Elizabeth, married the proud Duke of Somerset," in which title their son, Algernon Seymour, succeeded them, with that of Earl of Northumberland added thereto. This Algernon Seymour, like Josceline Percy, had but one child, Elizabeth, sole heiress now of the Somerset and Northumberland property. This Elizabeth once expressed her surprise at a lady having refused an offer of marriage made to her by the handsome baronet, Sir Hugh Smithson, whose father is described by some writers as a London apothecary, but whose family, landed gentry in the north, from the time of the Conquest, was as noble as that of the Percys, and only inferior to it in the fact that the hereditary title of the one was higher in the scale of precedence than that of the other. Sir Hugh married the Percy heiress, and was subsequently created Duke of Northumberland in 1766. In the well-nigh hundred years that have since elapsed, there have been four dukes, Sir Hugh, his son, and two grandsons. In the later as in

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the earlier days, these Northumbrian nobles have had to risk their lives in battle; the fourth Duke was in Lord Exmouth's expedition to Algiers, and his father distinguished himself in America. The latter, too, came into collision with the Government of his day, as his remote predecessors had often done; but in his case with less calamitous issue, George the Third had promised him the governorship of Tynemouth; but the King broke his royal word. When he was, subsequently, asked to go out to America as Commissioner," with a promise of the Garter on his return, he peremptorily refused; and when he was asked for the grounds of his refusal, he as promptly answered—his experience of what Court promises were !-Abridged from the Athenæum.

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THE POET GOWER, AND THE SUTHERLAND FAMILY.

In the fine old Church of St. Saviour, Southwark, in the south transept, is the Perpendicular monument of the poet Gower, removed from the north aisle of the nave in 1832, when it was restored and coloured at the expense of the first Duke of Sutherland, a presumed collateral descendant from the poet.

"We are afraid, on the showing of Sir H. Nicolas and Dr. Pauli, that the family of the Duke of Sutherland and Lord Ellesmere must relinquish all pretension to being related to, or even descended from John Gower. They have hitherto depended solely upon the possession of a MS. of the Confessio Amantis, which was supposed to have been presented to an ancestor by the poet; but it now turns out, on the authority of Sir Charles Young, Garter, that it was the very copy of the work which the author laid at the feet of King Henry IV., while he was yet Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby !"-(Review of Dr. Pauli's edition of the Confessio Amantis; Athenæum, No. 1537, P. 468.) Sir Richard Baker is the only Chronicler who gives the date of Gower's death correctly, namely, 1408, as in his Will; most if not all other writers represent Gower as dying in 1402 or 1403•

WARS OF THE ROSES.

Never was such devastation made in the ranks of our nobility, titled and untitled, as during the English "Thirty Years' War" of the White and the Red Roses. In the thirteen battles fought between York and Lancaster, from that of St. Albans, in 1455, to that on Redmore Down, near Bosworth, in 1485,-in nine of which battles the Yorkists were victors, yet they ultimately lost the great prize at Bosworth,—there perished in fight, by murder, or under the axe, two kings, four princes, ten dukes, two marquises, one-and-twenty earls, two viscounts, and seven-and-twenty barons. To these may be added, one lord-prior, one judge, one hundred and thirty-nine knights, all noble; four hundred and forty-one esquires, the eldest sons of knights; and a body of gentlemen, or untitled nobility, of coat-armour and ancestry, the number of

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whom is variously stated, but which number being incorporated with the death-roll cf private soldiers, swelled the great total to nearly eightysix thousand men. Such was the cost to the country of that country's best blood, shed in a quarrel which, after all, ended in a wedding by way of compromise.-Athenæum.

THE PROUD SOMERSETS.

The pride of lineage was, perhaps, never more strongly displayed than by the Somersets and Seymours, who were of the same stock; and a prouder man was never seen in England than the Duke of Somerset of two centuries ago, who had the highways cleared before him, that he might not be looked upon by vulgar eyes, and who rebuked his second wife for tapping his shoulder with her fan, saying, “Madam, my first wife was a Percy, and she never took such a liberty." We may go back at once to Cardinal Beaufort, who was of the first generation of the family apart from royalty, he being the natural son of John of Gaunt. There is a better ground of pride in the family than even antiquity. Among the proud Somersets was he who, in early life, commanded a little army, raised by his father for the service of Charles I., and who, in after years, wrote the Century of Inventions, and first applied the condensation of steam to a practical purpose, though his invention was used only for raising water. He was the last noble who held out in his castle against Cromwell; and the stronghold was the Raglan Castle which gave his title to the Field-Marshal who, in 1854, commanded the British army in the Crimea.

WHO WAS JACK CADE?

Mr. M. A. Lower, F.S.A., in his ingenious Essays on English Surnames, thus corrects an error into which most of our historians have fallen, relative to the arch-traitor Jack Cade, temp. Hen. VI.

They uniformly state that he was an Irishman by birth, but there is strong presumptive evidence that to Sussex belongs the unenviable claim of his nativity. Speed states that he had been servant to Sir Thomas Dagre. Now this Sir Thomas Dagre, or Dacre, was a Sussex knight of great eminence, who had seats at Hurstmonceaux and Heathfield, in this county. Cade has, for several centuries, been a common name about Mayfield and Heathfield, as is proved, as well by numerous entries in the parish registers, as by lands and localities designated from the family. After the defeat and dispersion of his rabble-rout of retainers, Cade is stated to have fled into the woods of Sussex, where, a price being set upon his head, he was slain by Sir Alexander Iden, sheriff of Kent. Nothing seems more probable than that he should have sought shelter from the vindictive fury of his enemies among the woods of his native county, with whose secret retreats he was, doubtless, well acquainted, and where he would have been likely to meet with friends. The daring recklessness of this villain's character is illustrated by the tradition of the district that he was engaged in the rustic game of bowls, in the garden