g. they had on their left arm an
armilla of tinn, printed in some workes, about four inches long; they
could not gett it off. They wore about their necks a great horn of an
oxe in a string or bawdrie, which, when they came to an house for
almes, they did wind: and they did putt the drink given them into this
horn, whereto they did putt a stopple. Since the warres I doe not
remember to have seen any one of them. (I have seen them in
Worcestershire within these thirty years, 1756. MS. NOTE, ANONYMOUS.)
[This account of the " bedlam beggars" so well known to our
forefathers, is repeated by Aubrey in his "Remains of Gentilism,"
(Lansdowne MSS. No. 231,) portions of which have been printed in Mr.
Thoms's Anecdotes and Traditions (1839). The passage corresponding
with the above is quoted by Mr. Charles Knight from the manuscript
referred to, in illustration of the character of "Mad Tom," assumed
by Edgar, in Shakspere's play of King Lear.- J. B.]
PART II. - CHAPTER V.
ARTS: LIBERALL AND MECHANICK.
CRICKLAD, a market and borough town in this county, was an University
before the Conquest, where were taught the liberall arts and sciences,
as may appeare by the learned notes of Mr. Jo. Selden on Drayton's
Poly-Olbion, and by a more convincing and undenyable argument out of
Wheelock's translation of Bede's History.
This University was translated from hence to Oxford. But whereas
writers swallow down the old storie that this place takes its name
from certain Greek philosophers, who, they say, began here an
university, it is a fond opinion.
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