The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
The Attorney-general on a day, having King Charles I. and the
principal officers and nobility of his Court, at a dinner at his house
in London, at which time the Arch Poet Ben Jonson, and others, being
at an inn on the other side the street, and wanting both meat and
money for their subsistence, at that exigent resolved to try an
expedient to get his dinner from the Attorney-general’s table; in
order to which, by his landlord at the inn aforesaid, he sent a white
timber plate or trencher to him, when the King was sat down to table,
whereon was inscribed these words:
When the world was drowned
No deer was found,
Because there was noe Park;
And here I sitt
Without ere a bitt,
Cause Noyah hath all in his Arke.
Which plate being presented by the Attorney-general to the King,
produced this effect, that Jonson had a good dish of venison sent him
back by the bearer, to his great content and satisfaction; on which
aforesaid plate, by the King’s direction, Jonson’s rhymes were thus
inverted or contradicted:
When the world was drowned
There deer was found,
Although there was noe park;
I send thee a bitt
To quicken thy witt,
Which comes from Noya’s Arke.
William Noye, anagram, I moyle in Law. He was the blow-coal,
incendiary, or stirrer up of the Civil Wars between King Charles and
his Parliament, by asserting and setting up the King’s prerogative to
the highest pitch, as King James I. had done before, beyond the laws
of the land as aforesaid; and as Counsell for the King he prosecuted
for King Charles I. the imprisoned Members of the House of Commons,
1628: viz. Sir John Elyot, Mr. Coryton, and others; whom after much
cost and trouble he got to be fined two thousand pounds each, the
others five hundred pounds, and further to be sentenced,
notwithstanding they paid those fines, not to be delivered from prison
without submission and acknowledgment of their offences, and security
to be put in for their good behaviour for the future.
Den-sill, alias Dyn-sill, in this parish, synonymous words, signifying
man-chapel or church, or a man of the church or chapel; otherwise
Den-sell is either man-great or great-man; and upon the confines of
those lands, on the high and lofty downs, is situate Densill Barrow,
that is to say Densill grave or burying place; a notable tumulus,
wherein some person of this little barton, after the ancient British
manner, was, before or soon after Christianity prevailed, here
interred. The rubbish and down-fallen walls of a free chapel,
heretofore on this place, prove the truth of this etymology, known now
by the name of Chapel Garder; garda, gerder, is a churchyard or field.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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