_Ascension-day._--Was "Ascension-day" ever kept a close holiday the same as Good Friday and Christmas-day? And, if so, when was such custom disused?
_The Grogog of a Castle._--It appears by a record of the Irish Exchequer of 3 Edw. II., that one Walter Haket, constable of Maginnegan's Castle in the co. of Dublin, confined one of the King's officers in the _Grogog_ thereof. Will you permit me to inquire, whether this term has been applied to the prison of castles in England?
I had hoped that the inquiry of R. S. F. would have drawn out some of your Edinburgh correspondents; but, as they are silent upon a subject they might have invested with interest, allow me to say a word upon these Canongate marriages. I need not, I think, tell R. S. F. how loosely our countrymen, at the period alluded to, and long subsequent thereto, looked upon the marriage tie; as almost every one who has had occasion to touch upon our _domestic_ manners and customs has pointed at, what appeared to them, and what really was, an anomaly in the character of a nation somewhat boastful of their better order and greater sense of propriety and decorum.
Besides the incidental notices of travellers, the legal records of Scotland are rife with examples of litigation arising out of these irregular marriages; and upon a review of the whole history of such in the north, it cannot be denied that, among our staid forefathers, "matrimony was more a matter of merriment"[2] than a solemn and religious engagement.
The Courts in Scotland usually _frowned_ upon cases submitted to them where there was a strong presumption that either party had been victimised by the other; but, unfortunately, the requirements were so simple, and the facility of procuring witnesses so great, that many a poor frolicksome fellow paid dearly for his joke by finding himself suddenly transformed, from a bachelor, to a spick and span Benedict; and that too upon evidences which would not in these days have sent a fortune-telling impostor to the tread-mill: the lords of the justiciary being content that some one had heard him use the endearing term of wife to the pursuer, or had witnessed a mock form at an obscure public-house, or that the parties were by habit and repute man and wife. How truly then may it have been said, that a man in the Northern Capital, so open to imposition, scarcely knew whether he was married or not.