vi                                              Preface.

that the Susquehannough Fort* shall mark his southern boundary; then
his letter to the Marylanders of Baltimore and Cecil Counties; the
attempts to determine the boundary, and the proceedings of Markham;
the interviews between Baltimore and Penn in Anne Arundel County
and at New Castle, and the proceedings before the Board of Trade and
Privy Council.

The murder of Rousby by Talbot, and the escape of the homicide,
about which later tradition has spun a web of romantic fiction, are here
mentioned, and have their place in a combined assault of animosity and
cupidity upon the Proprietary's rights and territories.

In the first vol. of Assembly Proceedings (p. 538) the word " tamett,"
and in the Provincial Court Record (p. 77) the phrase "ocome spoons,"
were confessed by the editor to be too hard for him. Two obliging
correspondents have furnished explanations. " Tamett" should be
" tarret," or " tarrat," a provincial word, denned in a Hampshire Glossary
(Eng. Dial. Soc.) as " a loft or room under the roof." " Ocome " is a
phonetic spelling for " alchemy," a word used at the time to signify an
alloy resembling gold. "Alcomie buttons" occurs in the London
Gazette of 1677.

W. H. B.

* This was the fort, or block-house, built by the Maryland militia for the Susquehannoughs in 1661
(see Council Proceedings, first vol., p. 417), and placed exactly on the 40th parallel of latitude, as
Herman's map (1670) shows. We thus see that the plea that Penn understood the southern and
not the northern limit of the 40th degree to be his boundary was an afterthought.