2. ‘In one sent me by my worthy friend Dr Thomas Witherley of Walsingham’ (Browne marg.). See further below, p. 280.
3. Manes are the spirits of the dead; aræ are altars for demigods or heroes, and altaria, for gods.
4. The urns were in fact Saxon, not Roman (see §298). Browne later recognises that some ‘might somewhat doubt’ whether the urns did not belong ‘unto our Brittish, Saxon, or Danish Forefathers’ (below, p. 281).
5. i.e. county.
6. As early.
7. Tacitus, Annals, XIV, 31–8.
8. The Gammadims (Ezekiel 27.11) were thought to be the inhabitants of Anconia (from the Greek άγκών, ‘bend of the elbow’). Hence Norfolk’s ‘Emphaticall appellation’ (G2).
9. ‘The population is innumerable; the farm-buildings are found very close together, being very like those of the Gauls’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Caesar, Gallic War, V, 12).
10. i.e. ramparts.
11. ‘In the ground of my worthy Friend Rob. Jegon Esq. wherein some things contained were preserved by the most worthy Sir William Paston, Bt.’ (Browne marg.).
12. ‘From Castor to Thetford the Romanes accounted thirty two miles, and from thence observed not our common road to London, but passed by Combretonium ad Ansam, Canonium, Cæsaromagus [i.e. Ipswich, Dedham, Kelvedon, Chelmsford], &c. by Bretenham, Coggesball, Chelmeford, Burnt-wood, &c.’ (Browne marg.). Castor is Caistor St Edmunds (Venta Ice-norum); but Sitomagus is Stowmarket, not Thetford.
13. ‘Most at Caster by Yarmouth, found in a place called East-bloudy-burgh furlong, belonging to Mr Thomas Wood, a person of civility, industry and knowledge in this way, who hath made observation of remarkable things about him, and from whom we have received divers Silver and Copper Coynes’ (Browne marg.).
14. Belonging to that Noble Gentleman, and true example of worth Sir Ralph Hare Baronet, my honoured Friend’ (Browne marg.).
15. ‘A peece of Maud [i.e. Matilda] the Empresse said to be found in Buckenham Castle with this Inscription, Elle n’a elle’ (Browne marg.). The reference is probably to a coin; but the inscription is meaningless.
16. ‘At Thorpe’ (Browne marg.).
17. Norwich replaced Venta (previous page, note 12), but on a different site.
18. So the Chronicon Brompton Abbatis Jornalensis (Browne marg.).
19. In Plutarch, Lycurgus, IX (Browne marg.), the money is iron, not copper.
20. Caesar, Gallic War, V, 12, also mentions other metals.
21. Later mintage (R).
22. ‘Stowe Survey of London’ (Browne marg.).
23. Tear-bottles’ (as below, p. 286).
24. Septimius Severus (d. 211). See further below, p. 285, note 8.
25. ‘They denounce funeral pyres and condemn cremation’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Minucius Felix, Octavius, XI, 4).
26. Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters, III, 3 (Browne marg.).
27. Genesis 23.9 (Browne suppl., quoting the Vulgate).
28. ‘smalness’ (Blount).
29. Propertius, Elegies, IV, vii, 9.
30. As reported in Vegenère’s edition of Livy (Browne marg.).
31. As reported by Chifflet (Browne marg.).
32. Joshua 24.30 (31) according to the Septuagint.
33. Cicero, Letters to Quintus, II, xv (xvi), 4.
34. So Dio Cassius, LXXII, 12 (Browne marg.).
35. ‘As also by Amandus Zierexensis in Historia, and Pineda in his Universa historia. Spanish’ (Browne suppl., correcting the inadvertent introduction of this phrase into the text of the 1st edition).
36. In Gallic War, VI, 16.
37. In Agricola, XXI.
38. i.e. Swedes and Goths. ‘Sarmatia’ is the area extending across N.E. Europe.
39. A district in Schleswig (R).
40. ‘Roisold, Brendetiide, Ildtyde’ (Browne add.), each signifying the Age of Burning.
41. In his Danica Monumenta (Browne marg.). Wormius is the principal authority for these paragraphs.
42. So Cypraeus (Browne marg.).
43. ‘In Norfolk’ (Browne marg.). Three other marginal notes in this paragraph specify Browne’s sources as Camden, Twyne, and Holinshed.
1. Matthew 23.29 (Browne marg.).
2. Euripides, Hecuba, II. 317–20 (Browne marg.).
3. Psalm 63.9 (Browne marg.).
4. See above, p. 103, note 208.
5. ‘that whiche hath a shelle’ (Elyot).
6. ‘a sharde [fragment] of a potte or tyle, also an erthen pot’ (Elyot).
7. So Pliny, XXXV, 45 and 49.
8. ‘Thou shalt hold that man whom the world could not hold’ (Browne marg., quoting the Greek of Dio Cassius, LXXVII, xv, 4; R).
9. See above, p. 277.
10. Iliad, XXIII, 254.
11. ‘coverynge or cover’ (Elyot).
12. ‘With tears they laid out [the corpse]’ (Browne marg., in Latin).
13. ‘made thick or gross’ (Blount).
14. i.e. vinous quality. The detail is reported by Lazius (Browne marg.).
15. ‘About five hundred years. Plato’ (Browne marg.). Cf. The Republic, VIII, 546.
16. i.e. dated by the consuls in office at the time of vintage (R).
17. The celebrated wine of 121 B.C., in the consulate of Opimius, as reported by Petronius, XXXIV, 6 (Browne marg.).
18. As reported in the Twelve Tables (Browne marg.). Cf. above, p. 269, note 17.
19. See above, pp. 274 and 280.
20. So Pliny, XVI, 78 (Browne marg.).
21. ‘Conservatory, a place to preserve, or keep things in’ (Blount).
22. So Casalius (Browne marg.).
23. Hebrews 9.4.
24. In Jewish Antiquities, I, iii, 5; XX, ii, 2.
25. So Goropius (Browne marg.).
26. So Biringuccio (Browne marg.).
27. ‘At Elmeham’ (Browne marg.).
28. Plutarch, Philopoemen, XXI, 3.
29. Laws, 958e.
30. Matthew 27.5–8.
31. Mingled.
32. Where the bodies of those held in contempt were burnt or thrown to the dogs (R).
33. ‘contrived’ (the word is a pen-and-ink correction in a copy of the 1st edition; M).
34. Suetonius, Tiberius, LXXV, 3 (Browne marg.).
35. Suetonius, Nero, XLIX, 4.
36. Suetonius, Domitian, XVII, 3 (Browne marg.); and Odyssey, XXIV, 76–7.
37. ‘S[ee] the most learned and worthy Mr M. Casaubon upon Antoninus’ (Browne marg.).
38. Petronius, XXXIV.
39. ‘ ’ Aγχώνην παζειν [i.e. The Hanging game]. A barbarous pastime at Feasts, when men stood upon a rolling Globe, with their necks in a Rope fastned to a beame, and a knife in their hands, ready to cut it when the stone was rolled away, wherein if they failed they lost their lives to the laughter of their spectators’ (Browne marg.). So Athenaeus IV, 155.
40. ‘Diis manibus’ (Browne marg.) – i.e. ‘To the gods of the underworld’: the common way that Roman funerary inscriptions began.
41. Dishes used in libations at sacrifices.
42. Vault. As reported by Bosio (Browne marg.).
43. Exodus 25.31 ff.
44. Of whom the first lived in a tomb, and the second frequented the Roman catacombs.
45. Repeatedly.
46. Ezekiel 37.1 ff.
47. Felt.
48. So Pausanias (Browne marg.). ‘Attica’ corrects the erroneous ‘Africa’ of the 1st edition.
49. So Lampridius (Browne marg.).
50. The Emperor Trajan (Browne marg.).
51. So Plutarch, Marcellus, XXX, 2–3 (Browne marg.).
52. ‘The Commission of the Gothish King Tbeodoric for finding out sepulchrall treasure’ (Browne marg.); so Cassiodorus in Variae. ‘Expilators’ are plunderers.
53. Literally, ‘damned earth’: in alchemy, the residue after calcination.
54. Pliny, XXX, 4 (Browne marg.).
55. Er, in The Republic, X, 614b.
56. ‘Which could not be burnt’ (Browne suppl.). So Pliny, VII, 2.
57. ‘made of erthe’ (Elyot).
58. Decorated with representations of ancient funeral rites (R).
59. Incombustible.
60. ‘Old bones according to Lyserus. Those of young persons not tall nor fat according to [Realdus] Columbus’ (Browne marg.).
61. Who died from dropsy, as reported by Diogenes Laertius.
62. Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, XIII, 4–5 (Browne marg.).
63. Thucydides, II, lii, 4 (Browne marg.).
64. So Valla (Browne marg.).
65. Iliad, XXIII, 164 (Browne marg., quoting the original Greek), and Plutarch, Pompey, LXXX, 2.
66. Genesis 22.6: ‘the wood of the burnt offering [laid] upon Isaac’.
67. ‘The brain. Hippocrates’ (Browne marg.).
68. Capable of being made thinner.
69. Amos 2.1 (Browne marg.).
70. ‘cruelty, fierceness’ (Blount).
71. ‘As Artemisia of her Husband Mausolus’ (Browne marg.).
72. Earthenware vessels; cf. above, p. 285, note 6.
73. Genesis 23.5–20 and 49.29–32, and Joshua 24.30.
74. ‘Siste viator’ (Browne marg.) – i.e. ‘Stop passerby’: a variation on Cicero’s rendering of Simonides’s inscription at Thermopylae.
75. Archbishop Cuthbert, buried in Canterbury Cathedral in 758.
76. So Kirchmann (Browne marg.), one of the major sources for these paragraphs (cf. above, p. 269, note 14).
77. ‘length’ (Bullokar). On St Helena see also above, p. 96.
78. Corrected by some editors to ‘gnaw’d’ But Browne may have been thinking of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, e.g. ‘That skull had a tongue in it,… How the knave jowls it to the ground’ (V, i, 78–9; §298).
79. i.e. adipocere or grave wax, ‘the insoluble fatty acids left as a residue of the pre-existing fats of animals, and produced by the slow hydrolysis of the fats in the wet ground’ (§190). This is generally regarded as Browne’s ‘one notable scientific discovery’ (ibid.), well in advance of its rediscovery by Fourcroy in the eighteenth century (see especially §§296, 298).
80. Alkaline.
81. i.e. syphilis.
82. ‘Of Thomas Marquesse of Dorset, whose body being buried 1530 was [in] 1608 upon the cutting open of the Cerecloth found perfect and nothing corrupted, the flesh not hardened, but in colour, proportion, and softnesse like an ordinary corps newly to be interred. Burtons descript. of Leicestershire’ (Browne marg.).
83. Joining together.
84. ‘Arefactio, to make drie’ (Elyot).
85. ‘In his Map of Russia’ (Browne marg.), which shows in the east a group of natives turned to stone (G2). On Lot’s wife see Genesis 19.26.
86. i.e. appendages.
87. ‘That part in the Skeleton of an Horse, which is made by the hanch-bones’ (Browne suppl.).
88. ‘For their extraordinary thicknesse’ (Browne suppl.).
89. ‘The Poet Dante in his view of Purgatory [XXIII, 31–3], found gluttons so meagre, and extenuated, that he conceited them to have been in the Siege of Jerusalem, and that it was easie to have discovered Homo or Omo in their faces: M being made by the two lines of their cheeks, arching over the Eyebrows to the nose, and their sunk eyes making O O which makes up Omo.
Parean l’occhiaie anella senza gemme:
Che nel viso degli huomini legge buomo,
Ben’havria quivi conosciuto l’emme.’ (Browne marg.)
90. i.e. assert identities.
91. Cf. Matthew 27.52–3.
92. Genesis 49.29.
93. So Tirinus in annotating Ezekiel 31.1 ff. (Browne marg.).
1. Leviticus 4.12.
2. 1 Corinthians 6.19.
3. i.e. the Eastern Orthodox ritual of burial appears especially to move the emotions.
4. ‘Just like the promise that he shall come to life again, which was made by Democritus; who, however, never has come to life again himself. Out upon it! What downright madness it is, to suppose that life is to recommence after death!’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Pliny, VII, lv, 189).
5. ‘We hope that perhaps the remains of the departed may return from the earth into the light’ (Browne marg., quoted in Greek: R).
6 ‘That which once came from earth, to earth returns’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Lucretius, II, 999–1000). Cf. Ecclesiastes 12.7: ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth which was before the earth’.
7. Odyssey, XI, 222. ‘Demas’ and ‘soma’ are the living and the dead body, respectively.
8. Lucian, Hermotimus, VII.
9. Plato, Phaedo, 115e (Browne marg.).
10. i.e. philosophers who upheld the transmigration of souls.
11. Cf. the Platonic year (above, p. 66, note 29).
12. ‘Farewell, farewell, farewell. We shall follow you in the order in which nature permits’ (Browne marg., in Latin).
13. i.e. larch.
14. i.e. exsuccous: sapless. See the passage quoted on p. 39.
15. The exit and entrance of heaven, according to Macrobius, On ‘The Dream of Scipio’, I, 12 (M).
16. ‘Hurt not my spirit’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Tibullus, I, i, 67).
17. ‘And unlike’ (the reading of E) ? ‘Nor like’ (K) ?
18. ‘Russians, &c.’ (Browne marg.).
19. i.e. reiterated calls.
20. ‘At least by some difference from living Eyes’ (Browne suppl.).
21. As reported by Perucci (Browne marg.).
22. Kindling.
23. i.e. Charon, who ferried the dead across the river Styx to Hades for the price of an obol.
24. i.e. said to have been killed by a malign planet’s influence.
The Major Works (English Library) Page 58