Nash's Lenten Stuff; Containing, the Description and First Procreation and Increase of the Towne of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk with a New Play, Never Played Before, of the Praise of the Red Herring (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871. Excerpt: ... holder, or Goodman Baltrop, that keeps a family in pay, cast for it as one of his standing provisions. The poorer sort make it three parts of their sustenance: with it, for his dinner, the patchedest leather pilche1 laboratho may dine like a Spanish Duke, when the niggardly mouse of beef will cost him sixpence. In the craft of catching, or taking and smudging it, (merchant and chapmanable as it should be), it sets a-work thousands, who lives all the rest of the year gaily well, by what, in some few weeks they scratch up then, and come to bear office of questman2 and 'pilch, Or Pilcher.--An outer garment generally worn in cold weather, and made of skins of fur; from pylche, a skin-coat, Saxon. The term is still retained in connected senses in our dialects. A piece of flannel or other woollen put under a child next the clout, is in Kent called a pilch; a coarse shagged piece of rug laid over a saddle for ease of a rider, is in our midland parts called a pilch. In our old dramatists the term is applied to a buff or leather jerkin, and Shakespeare has pilcher for the sheath of a sword: --"Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears?" Romeo and Juliet, iii, I. Decker says of Ben Jonson: --"Thou hast forgot how thou ambled'st in a leather pilch, by a playwaggon in the high-way." Satiromastix. "questman, Or Questmonger.--One who laid informations, and made a trade of petty law suits. In Clitus's Whimzies, the 16th section contains a long character of a questman (page 122), which in fact was an old name for a sides-man, or assistant to the churchwardens. See Blount's "Glosso graphia," in the word Sideman. He is described accordingly, with many quaint strokes of humour: --"A questman is a man of account for this yeere. He never goes without his note-book...