Queries.
"HOGS NORTON, WHERE PIGS PLAY UPON THE ORGANS."
I should be much obliged by any of your correspondents favouring me with
their opinions as to the origin of the above saying. Evans, in his
_Leicestershire Words_, says:
"The true name of the town, according to Peck, is Hocks Norton,
but vulgarly pronounced Hogs Norton. The organist to this parish
church was named Piggs."
But in Witt's _Recreations_, of which I have a copy of 1640, the
eighty-third epigram is "upon pigs devouring a bed of penny-royal,
commonly called _organs_:"
"A good wife once, a bed of organs set,
The pigs came in, and eat up every whit;
The goodman said, Wife, you your garden may
Hogs Norton call, here pigs on organs play."
_Organs_ from "organy;" French, _origan_; Latin, _origanum_.
Now it is evident that in 1640 the proverb was in vogue, and well
understood; but organs were not at that time common in churches,
especially parish churches, and as I do not know which of the many
Nortons in England is Mr. Peck's Hocks Norton, I cannot help considering
his derivation somewhat in the light of an anachronism.
I do not know the date of Howell's _English Proverbs_ quoted by Mr.
Halliwell in his _Archaic Dictionary_. Should there be such a place as
Hog's Norton, or Hock's Norton, is the Hock = Hok = oak tree? Acorns and
pigs were common associates.
The only instance that I recollect of pigs being connected with an
organ, is in that curious freak recorded of the Abbé Debaigne, maître de
musique to Louis XI., when he made a hog-organ by enclosing pigs of
various ages and pitches of voice in a kind of chest; the older ones on
the left hand for the bass, and the younger on the right for the treble:
over all these was suspended a key-board, which, when played on, pressed
long needles into the pigs' backs,--the result is left to the
imagination.