The English Annual (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1836 edition. Excerpt: ...The former story, however, is the more popular. The description of the fight, heightened by the solemn trembling tones of some antiquated dame on a winter's evening, is impossible to be dispensed with.-There is another marvellous occurrence woven in the history of this part of Herefordshire, which happened in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Camden relates the story. It appears that Marcley Hill on a sudden rose as it were from sleep, and for three days moved in its vast body with a horrible noise, driving every thing before it to a higher ground. According to'Fuller, the extent of this locomotive field was twenty acres; it travelled fourteen hours, and ascended eleven fathoms up hill, leaving a chasm four hundred feet wide, and five hundred and twenty long. " In some sort," he adds, "it. might seem to be in labour for three days together, shaking and roaring all that while, to the great terror of all that heard or beheld it." Sir Richard Baker, in his " Chronicle of England," explains this same phenomenon as follows: --" In the thirteenth year of Queen Elizabeth a prodigious earthquake happened in the east parts of Herefordshire, at a little town called Kinaston. On the 7th of F ebruary, at six o'clock in the evening, the earth began to open, and a hill with a rock under it, making at first a great bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off, lifted itself up, and began to travel, bearing along with it the trees that grew upon it, the sheep-folds and flocks of sheep abiding there at the same time. In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty foot broad, and four score ells long: the whole field was about twenty acres. Passing along, it over threw...