Chapter VII: Act I: SCENE 1. Page 170

PRO. For I will be thy _beadsman_, Valentine.

A beadsman is one who offers up prayers to heaven for the welfare of another. Many of the ancient petitions to great men were addressed to them by their "poor daily orators and beadsmen." _To count one's beads_, means, in the Romish church, to offer up as many prayers to God and the Virgin Mary as the priest or some voluntary penance or obligation shall have enjoined; and that no mistake may happen in the number, they are reckoned by means of certain balls strung in a kind of chaplet, and hence in the English language termed _beads_, from the Saxon beaꝺ, a prayer. There is much difference of opinion among ecclesiastical writers as to the origin of this practice. Some ascribe its invention to Peter the hermit in the eleventh century, others to Venerable Bede, misled probably by the affinity of the name. Monsieur Fleury more rationally conceives it to be not older than the eleventh century; but the probability is, that it was imported into Europe by the crusaders, who found it among the Mahometans. The latter use it wherever their religion has been planted, and there is even reason for supposing that it originated among the natives of Hindostan. These chaplets made of beads are called _rosaries_ when they are used in prayers to the Virgin. The term _bead_, as applied to the materials of which necklaces, &c. are made, seems therefore to have been borrowed from the chaplet of rosaries in question.

SCENE 1. Page 171.

PRO. Over the boots? Nay, _give me not the boots_.

An allusion, as it is supposed, to the diabolical torture of the boot. Not a great while before this play was written, it had been inflicted in the presence of King James on one Dr. Fian, a supposed wizard, who was charged with raising the storms that the King encountered in his return from Denmark. In the very curious pamphlet which contains the account of this transaction it is stated that "hee was with all convenient speed, by commandement, convaied againe to the _torment of the bootes_, wherein he continued a long time, and did abide so many blowes in them, that his legges were crushte and beaten togeather as small as might bee, and the bones and flesh so brused, that the bloud and marrowe spouted forth in great abundance, whereby they were made unserviceable for ever." The unfortunate man was afterwards burned. But the above instrument of torture was not, as suggested in one of the notes on this occasion, "used only in Scotland;" it was known in France, and in all probability imported from that country. The following representation of it is copied from Millæus's _Praxis criminis persequendi_, Paris, 1541, folio. This instrument of torture continued to be used in Scotland so late as the end of the 17th century. See _A hind let loose_, 1687, 8vo, pp. 186, 198, in the frontispiece to which work there is an indistinct representation of the boot. It is said to have been imported from Russia by a Scotchman. See Maclaurin's _Arguments in remarkable cases_, 4to, p. xxxvii.

SCENE 1. Page 171.

VAL. ... To be
In love, where scorn is bought with groans: coy looks,
With heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth,
With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights:
If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain;
If lost, why then a grievous labour won;
However, but a folly bought with wit,
Or else a wit by folly vanquished.

Thus explained by Dr. Johnson. "This love will end in a _foolish action_, to produce which you are long to spend your _wit_, or it will end in the loss of your wit, which will be overpowered by the folly of love;" an explanation that is in part very questionable. The poet simply means that love itself is sometimes a foolish object dearly attained in exchange for reason; at others the human judgment subdued by folly. He is speaking of love abstractedly, and not alluding to that of Proteus.

SCENE 1. Page 178.

SPEED. I thank you, you have _testern'd_ me.

Mr. Holt White's information from a passage in Latimer's sermons, that the tester was then worth _more_ than _six-pence_, is so far correct; but as an inference might be drawn from the quotation that it was actually worth _ten-pence_, it becomes necessary to state that at that time, viz. in 1550, the tester was worth _twelve-pence_. It is presumed that no accurate account of this piece of coin has been hitherto given; and therefore the following attempt, which has been attended with no small labour, may not be unacceptable.

The term, variously written, _teston_, _tester_, _testern_, and, in _Twelfth night_, _testril_, is from the French _teston_, and so called from the king's head, which first appeared on this coin in the reign of Louis XII. A. D. 1513, though the Italians seem previously to have had a coin of the same denomination. In our own country the name was first applied to the English shilling (originally coined by Henry the Seventh) at the beginning of the reign of Henry the Eighth, probably because it resembled in value the French coin above described; so that _shilling_ and _teston_ were at that time synonymous terms. Although the teston underwent several reductions in value, it appears to have been worth twelve-pence at the beginning of Edward the Sixth's reign, from three several proclamations in his second and third years for calling in, and at length annihilating, this coin, on account of the forgeries that had been committed; Sir William Sharington having falsified it to the amount of 12,000_l._, for which by an express act of parliament he was attainted of treason. In the above proclamations the testons are specifically described as "pieces of xiid commonly called testons;" and in the last of them, the possessors are allowed twelve-pence apiece on bringing them to the mint. Sir Henry Spelman, who has asserted in his glossary that the teston was reduced to nine-pence in the _first_ year of King Edward, must be mistaken. Stowe more correctly informs us that on the 9th of July 1551 (the _fifth_ year of the King's reign), the base shillings of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. were called down to _nine_-pence, and on the 17th of August following to _six_-pence. He afterwards, under the year 1559, cites a proclamation for reducing it still lower, viz. to fourpence halfpenny. We must conclude that it again rose in value as the coin became improved; for it appears from _Twelfth night_, Act II. Scene 3, that it was in Shakspeare's time the same as the six-pence, and it has probably continued ever since as another name for that coin.

SCENE 2. Page 185.

JUL. I see you have a _month's mind_ to them.

There is a great deal of quotation given in the notes, but nothing after all that amounts to an explanation of the term. It alludes to the mind or _remembrance_ days of our Popish ancestors. Persons in their wills often directed that in a _month_, or any other specific time, from the day of their decease, some solemn office for the repose of their souls, as a mass or dirge, should be performed in the parish church, with a suitable charity or benevolence on the occasion. Polydore Vergil has shown that the custom is of Roman origin; and he seems to speak of the month's mind as a ceremony peculiar to the English. _De rer. invent._ lib. vi. c. 10.