bloody slaughter on the Sunday morning in the harvesttide of 1459, when the country legends say the Hempmill brook and the little river Tearn ran red with blood for days. Here we must not tarry, for the man who farms the land is extra cross, as one of my first pilgrimages told; but the roadside for miles has broad bands of flaming yellow broom in flower, and in it we may roll in gold. Literally, there are miles of brilliant golden borders to the road, and when we mount again the good bikes of themselves roll down the long hill towards the setting sun and on the way for home.

MESS, MEES, OR MEECE, HALL

SWYNNERTON

AR

S this pilgrimage was mainly to the place from whence came the direct male line of my fathers, and must therefore relate to family history more than some readers would like, this timely notice will enable them to skip it before they are wearied.

The etymology and derivation of names is an interesting study, especially when it is one's own name that is under investigation, and the changes that time has wrought in it as in all other things are known. When under the inquisition of the catechism we are asked what is our name and who gave us that name, it is all very well to put the responsibility of it on to our godparents, but where did they get it from? Now, my Christian name Fletcher was a surname meaning a fledger, or featherer of arrows, and Moss was almost certainly given as a distinguishing name to some male ancestor who lived on or by a moss.

It happened that my father was born at a very old house known as Mees Hall, which still stands near to the railway a little past Standon Bridge station, on the left as one goes from Crewe to Stafford. It is built of big blocks of warm-coloured stone up to the eaves, with stone mullioned windows, three timber-built gables, and big stone chimneys, and it stands by the little river Mees or Sow. The family left the place in the severe depression that came on the yeomen of England after the long wars with Napoleon, my grandfather selling his last

bit of land in 1816, and the hall, which was very old then, is now owned by the Fitzherberts of Swynnerton, and looks as if precious little had been spent on it in the last hundred years.

The name of Mees, though very short, is spelt in different ways even on the signposts in the road. There are Coldmeese and Millmeece. Long ago I had wondered if Mees and Moss had originally been the same name, and lately I looked for the place in the great book which is the foundation of all local history, the Domesday Survey of the Conqueror. There I found "In Mess Vlfere tenuit Tra e II car," which I translate "In Mess Wolfer held two carucates of land." Another entry says, "In Ecleshelle Ipse eps ten in Mess"-" In Eccleshall the bishop himself holds Mess." Therefore the Church, in the shape of the bishops of Chester, grabbed the Saxons' land, and I have somewhere read that in after years the Priory of Ronton, a neighbouring religious house under the abbey of Haughmond, claimed some rights.

The Anglo-Saxon dictionary gives "meos as their word for moss, the spelling looking like a compromise between moss and mess; and to make a note by the way, let me say that Ulf or some compound of the word, were common names with the Saxons when wolves were common in the land. In 1086 Wolfer held Mess. In 1812 Eliza Moss was born at Mees Hall, married a Woolf, and is still living within a mile. of the place in full possession of her faculties, able to eat, drink, sing, and be merry at the age of ninety years.

To continue my search I looked up the Court Rolls for Staffordshire, and soon found many variations of the name, for to get into trouble and debt seems characteristic of the family. At the Stafford Assize of 1278 there is a notable entry, for it gives both forms of spelling the same short name-" Matilda, the widow of