Notes and Queries, Number 29, May 18, 1850. Various
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1850.
PROVINCIAL WORDS
In Twelfth Night, Act ii. Scene 3., occur the words "Sneck up," in C. Knight's edition, or "Snick up," Mr. Collier's edition. These words appear most unaccountably to have puzzled the commentators. Sir Toby Belch uses them in reply to Malvolio, as,—
"Mal. My masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an alehouse of my lady's house, that you squeak out your cozier's catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, person, nor time, in you?
"Sir To. We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. Sneck up!"
"Sneck up," according to Mr. C. Knight, is explained thus:—
"A passage in Taylor, the Water Poet, would show that this means 'hang yourself.' A verse from his 'Praise of Hempseed' is given in illustration."
"Snick up," according to Mr. Collier, is said to be "a term of contempt," of which the precise meaning seems to have been lost. Various illustrations are given, as see his Note; but all are wide of the meaning.
Turn to Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 2d edition, and there is this explanation:—
"SNECK, that part of the iron fastening of a door which is raised by moving the latch. To sneck a door, is to latch it."
See also Burn's Poems: The Vision, Duan First, 7th verse, which is as follows:—
"When dick! the string the snick did draw,—
And jee! the door gaed to the wa';
An' by my ingle-lowe I saw,
Now bliezin' bright,
A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw,
Come full in sight."
These quotations will clearly show that "sneck" or "snick" applies to a door; and that to sneck a door is to shut it. I think, therefore, that Sir Toby meant to say in the following reply:—
"We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. Sneck up!"
That is, close up, shut up, or, as is said now, "bung up,"—emphatically, "We kept true time;" and the probability is, that in saying this, Sir Toby would accompany the words with the action of pushing an imaginary door; or sneck up.
In the country parts of Lancashire, and indeed throughout the North of England, and it appears Scotland also, the term "sneck the door" is used indiscriminately with "shut the door" or "toin't dur." And there can be little doubt but that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, as his works are full of such; many of which have either been passed over by his commentators, or have been wrongly noted, as the one now under consideration.
Shakspeare was essentially a man of the people; his learning was from within, not from colleges or schools, but from the universe and himself. He wrote the language of the people; that is, the common every-day language of his time: and hence mere classical scholars have more than once mistaken him, and most egregiously misinterpreted him, as I propose to show in some future Notes.
FOLK LORE
Death-bed Superstition. (No. 20. p. 315.).—The practice of opening doors and boxes when a person dies, is founded on the idea that the ministers of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door (which alone would serve the purpose), crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid: an open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were at least assured that they were not made the unconscious instruments of torturing the departed in their daily occupations. The superstition prevails in the North as well as in the West of England; and a similar one exists in the South of Spain, where I have seen it practised.
Among the Jews at Gibraltar, at which place I have for many years been a resident, there is also a strange custom when a death occurs in the house; and this consists in pouring away all the water contained in any vessel, the superstition being that the angel of death may have washed his sword therein.
May Marriages.—It so happened that yesterday I had both a Colonial Bishop and a Home Archdeacon taking part in the services of my church, and visiting at my house; and, by a singular coincidence, both had been solicited by friends to perform the marriage ceremony not later than to-morrow, because in neither case would the bride-elect submit to be married in the month of May. I find that it is a common notion amongst ladies, that May marriages are unlucky.
Can any one inform me whence this prejudice arose?
Ecclesfield, April 29. 1850.
[This superstition is as old as Ovid's time, who tells us in his Fasti,
"Nec viduæ tædis eadem, nec virginis apta
Tempora. Quæ nupsit non diuturna fuit.
Hac quoque de causa (si te proverbia tangunt),
Mense malas Maio nubere vulgus ait."
The last line, as our readers may remember, (see ante, No. 7. p. 97.), was fixed on the gates of Holyrood on the morning (16th of May) after the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots and Bothwell.]
Throwing Old Shoes at a Wedding.—At a wedding lately, the bridesmaids, after accompanying the bride to the hall-door, threw into the carriage, on the departure of the newly-married couple, a number of old shoes which they had concealed somewhere. On inquiry, I find this custom is not uncommon; I should be glad to be favoured with any particulars respecting its origin and meaning, and the antiquity of it.
[We have some NOTES on the subject of throwing Old Shoes after a person as a means of securing them good fortune, which we hope to insert in an early Number.]
Sir Thomas Boleyn's Spectre.—Sir Thomas Boleyn, the father of the unfortunate Queen of Henry VIII., resided at Blickling, distant about fourteen miles from Norwich, and now the residence of the dowager Lady Suffield. The spectre of this gentleman is believed by the vulgar to be doomed, annually, on a certain night in the year, to drive, for a period of 1000 years, a coach drawn by four headless horses, over a circuit of twelve bridges in that vicinity. These are Aylsham, Burgh, Oxnead, Buxton, Coltishall, the two Meyton bridges, Wroxham, and four others whose names I do not recollect. Sir Thomas carries his head under his arm, and flames issue from his mouth. Few rustics are hardy enough to be found loitering on or near those bridges on that night; and my informant averred, that he was himself on one occasion hailed by this fiendish apparition, and asked to open a gate, but "he warn't sich a fool as to turn his head; and well a' didn't, for Sir Thomas passed him full gallop like:" and he heard a voice which told him that he (Sir Thomas) had no power to hurt such as turned a deaf ear to his requests, but that had he stopped he would have carried him off.
This tradition I have repeatedly heard in this neighbourhood from aged persons when I was a child, but I never found but one person who had ever actually seen the phantom. Perhaps some of your correspondents can give some clue to this extraordinary sentence. The coach and four horses is attached to another tradition I have heard in the west of Norfolk; where the ancestor of a family is reported to drive his spectral team through the old walled-up gateway of his now demolished mansion, on the anniversary of his death: and it is said that the bricks next morning have ever been found loosened and fallen, though as constantly repaired. The particulars of this I could easily procure by reference to a friend.
P.S. Another vision of Headless Horse is prevalent at Caistor Castle, the seat of the Fastolfs.
Shuck the Dog-fiend.—This phantom I have heard many persons in East Norfolk, and even Cambridgeshire, describe as having seen