The mistakes made through want of this knowledge are common, and sometimes very amusing. Familiar enough is the old story of the parish priest in the time of King Henry VIII., who in the canon of the Mass, in the prayer after taking the wine, read the word ‘_sumpsimus_’ as _mumpsimus_, because he had a thirteenth-century missal in which _s_ and _m_ are much alike, and refused to alter his mistake when it was pointed out to him. It was referred to by King Henry VIII. in his speech to the Parliament in 1545, and, in fact, this ignorant priest has ‘made himself an everlasting name’ for conservative stupidity. In more recent times, the historian of one of our beautiful north-country abbeys talks of a gift of a silver chest by the founder in the eleventh century. The reader wonders what this chest could have been--was it a native work or imported? was it some ecclesiastical ornament or merely a strong box? But on turning to the document on which the account is based, the meaning is clear. It was not a chest of silver, but an ordinary coin known as a mark of silver. The MS. reads _unāmarcāargenti_. The writer of the book had not noticed the contraction over the first _a_, divided the words wrongly, and read it _unam arcam_, instead of _unam marcam_. In another similar book the story is narrated of the ill-treatment by a forester of an abbot whose house was near a royal forest. The abbot was no doubt like the monk who made the celebrated pilgrimage to Canterbury-- ‘An outrydere that lovede venerye. * * * * * He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen That seith that hunters been nat holy men.’ And perhaps the forester had good reason to complain of him. But in the account of the quarrel, the forester is said to have gone into the abbot’s kitchen and taken away his cabbages--not very likely things for a forester to take, as he probably would have found something far better worth carrying off. However, on looking at the MS. it appears almost certain that what was read as _chous_ is really _chens_, that is, _chiens_. In fact, they were the ‘Grehoundes he hadde as swifte as fowel in flight, For priking and for hunting for the hare,’ who were perhaps lying before the fire asleep after a long afternoon’s coursing. In the same case it is said that the forester’s treatment of the tenants on one of the abbey farms is so bad that no one dare die there; it is suggested, because the forester would not allow anyone to come to administer the last consolations of religion. But the words _de murir_, on which the observation is based, are merely a careless scribe’s writing of _demeurer_. In another book farmers are represented as using stones for fuel, which are suggested to have been coal; but this results from mis-reading _pet^arum_ (peat), as if it were _pet^arum_, a contracted form of _petrarum_ (stones).