Appendix and Footnotes - Page 2

vexed, And the nailers were sorely provoked. Peter Stevens he swore a great oath, That Scroggins had played his cock foul; Scroggins gave him a kick on the head, And cried, Yea,--thy soul.

The company then fell in discord, A bold, bold fight did ensue; -, -, and bite was the word, Till the Walsall men all were subdued. Ralph Moody bit off a man's nose, And wished that he could have him slain, So they trampled both cocks to death, And they made a draw of the main.

The cock-pit was near to the church, An ornament unto the town; On one side an old coal pit, The other well gorsed around. Peter Hadley peeped through the gorse, In order to see them fight; Spittle jobbed out his eye with a fork, And said, -- thee, it served thee right.

Some people may think this strange, Who Wednesbury never knew; But those who have ever been there, Will not have the least doubt it's true; For they are as savage by nature, And guilty of deeds the most shocking; Jack Baker whacked his own father, And thus ended Wednesbury cocking.

APPENDIX B--Reforms Instituted at S. Michele in the year 1478

The palmiest days of the sanctuary were during the time that Rodolfo di Montebello or Mombello was abbot--that is to say, roughly, between the years 1325-60. "His rectorate," says Claretta, "was the golden age of the Abbey of La Chiusa, which reaped the glory acquired by its head in the difficult negotiations entrusted to him by his princes. But after his death, either lot or intrigue caused the election to fall upon those who prepared the ruin of one of the most ancient and illustrious monasteries in Piedmont." {34}

By the last quarter of the fifteenth century things got so bad that a commission of inquiry was held under one Giovanni di Varax in the year 1478. The following extracts from the ordinances then made may not be unwelcome to the reader. The document from which they are taken is to be found, pp. 322-336 of Claretta's work. The text is evidently in many places corrupt or misprinted, and there are several words which I have looked for in vain in all the dictionaries--Latin, Italian, and French--in the reading-room of the British Museum which seemed in the least likely to contain them. I should say that for this translation, I have availed myself, in part, of the assistance of a well-known mediaeval scholar, the Rev. Ponsonby A. Lyons, but he is in no way responsible for the translation as a whole.

After a preamble, stating the names of the commissioners, with the objects of the commission and the circumstances under which it had been called together, the following orders were unanimously agreed upon, to wit:-

"Firstly, That repairs urgently required to prevent the building from falling into a ruinous state (as shown by the ocular testimony of the commissioners, assisted by competent advisers whom they instructed to survey the fabric), be paid for by a true tithe, to