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Ploughman's Lunch
A ploughman's lunch is a cold snack or meal, comprising at a minimum a thick piece of cheese (usually Cheddar, Stilton, or other local cheese), pickle (often Branston Pickle, sometimes piccalilli and/or pickled onions), crusty bap or chunk of bread, and butter. It is often accompanied by a green salad; other common additions are half an apple, celery, pâté, sliced hard-cooked egg or beetroot. It is a common menu item in English pubs, often shortened when ordering to 'a ploughman's.' The familiarity of the ploughman's lunch has led catering companies to describe a sandwich containing Cheddar, pickle and salad as a 'ploughman's sandwich.' The authentic ploughman's lunch consisted of stale bread or a crusty loaf, and an English Cheddar or Stilton, and some variety of pickle. An apple would be included with the lunch to take away the spicy taste of the pickle and to provide a sweet finish, perhaps to be complemented by cider. Ideally, the apple would be of the same variety as that the cider was made from.

Much doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the ploughman's lunch, not least by the 1983 film of that name starring Jonathan Pryce (scripted by Ian McEwan) in which it is claimed that the ploughman's was the invention of an advertising company in the 1950s that was trying to boost the habit of buying meals in British pubs. The question is: did the ploughman's exist (albeit without that name) before the ad agency, or was it all a fiction that drew on the other fiction of Merrie England? Just the sort of postmodern conundrum you can rely on Pynchon to serve up.

Staindrop
Staindrop is an attractive village near Raby Castle, former stronghold of the Nevills, and has always been associated with the Lords of Raby.

devoirs
expressions of respect: expressions or acts of courtesy and respect

Rockingham Whigs
After a decade of factional chaos,.., a new system emerged, with two separate opposition groups. The Rockingham Whigs claimed the mantle of "Old Whigs," as the purported successors of the party of the Pelhams and the great Whig families. With such noted intellectuals as Edmund Burke behind them, the Rockingham Whigs laid out a philosophy which for the first time extolled the virtues of faction, or at least their faction. Wikipedia [Please do linking for a Wikipedia reference -- not enough linking! Thanks.]

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Cock Lane Ghost

[This is *way* too long for an annotation entry. Please begin the info here and then create an article and a link to it. You can have the full article. Thanks.]

Adjacent to London's Smithfield market and only a few minutes' walk from St Paul's Cathedral, is a short alleyway known as Cock Lane. The tall buildings and narrowness of this road give it a dark, foreboding presence and help to retain a sense of its origins as a medieval red-light district. It was this environment that, in January 1762, gave rise to an extraordinary scandal that engulfed all London.
The legitimacy of the hauntings is fiercly disputed to this day.

At the centre of the story is William Kent, a young man from Norfolk who managed to impregnate two daughters from the same wealthy family. The first, Elizabeth Lynes, he married, but she died in childbirth; a few months later, William eloped to London with his dead wife's sister, Fanny Lynes. Here William and Fanny lodged in Cock Lane at the house of a clerk named Richard Parsons. Fanny soon died, supposedly of smallpox and William found that he had made an enemy of both her family and Mr Parsons, whom he had sued for a debt.

However, the rivalry was only about to get deeper. The Parsons claimed to have been awoken by knocking and scratching in the night, and they could not find a tangible logical source for the knocking or scratching. Then, as further mysterious event occurred, they (according to the Parsons) summoned the courage to begin communicating with the ghost using Yes/No questions and a system of knocking for the answer (once for yes, two for no, or vice-versa, the accounts contradict themselves to an extent) and thus supposedly determined that they were communicating with the ghost of Fanny Lynes, who claimed that she died not of smallpox, as her husband claimed, but of arsenic poisoning in a premeditated murder by her husband, William Kent.

The Parsons soon gained the support of a few people, including a doctor and a priest, who worked to spread the word of the supposed haunting.

Londoners loved nothing more than a good sex and murder scandal and within days the Cock Lane ghost was headline news. Hundreds of people came to Cock Lane to listen to the ghost knock out its messages against William Kent. Events moved from the strange to the bizarre, with the fledgling Methodist movement – one of whose supporters heavily promoted the ghost – being dragged into the scandal. This further convinced Londoners of its reality and led to calls for William Kent to be hanged. The London authorities (including the Lord Mayor) dithered over the issue, creating a volatile atmosphere.

Eventually William Kent's cause was adopted by a group of "learned" people which included Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole and Oliver Goldsmith. They suspected that Richard Parsons was using his eleven-year-old daughter Betty to create the ghost and so got the Lord Mayor's permission to put her through a series of tests.

The "tests" used by these "learned" people left much to be desired. Even those who today deny the ghost's legitimacy admit that the committee acted very irrationally and unjustly.

The Committee refused to accept any possibility, no matter how seemingly strange, that the hauntings were legit and that anybody but the Parsons were guilty of it.

The first "test" composed of having a maid sleep with Betty in such a fashion that the maid bound Betty tightly to herself using her arms and legs. The knockings continued that night. The next night they bound Betty with chains as she slept. There was no knocking that night.

Thus the committee decided that Betty had to be responsible and that she had managed to slip out of maid's tight hold without rousing her and continue knocking.

However, the last "test" is agreed by all to have been unbelievably unfair and unjust. The Committee members discreetly drilled a peephole into Betty's door and then informed her that if there was no knocking that night, her entire family would be arrested and severely punished. They left her unbound. During the night the sentries at the peephole saw Betty get up and create the knocking.

The main point of debate is what motivated Betty to create the knocking that night. Those denying the existence of the ghost claim she had done it all along, and those supporting the legitimacy of the hauntings claim that she was scared for her family and what the Committee would do if there was no knocking, and thus did the only thing she could to insure that there was knocking that night: by doing it herself.

However, both sides agree about what happened next. Thus, the entire family was arrested anyway.

In July 1762 the main Pro-Parsonists (including Richard Parsons, his wife, several neighbours, a priest and a newspaper editor) were brought before the King's Bench and given lengthy prison terms and/or large fines. Richard Parsons went down for five years and was sentenced to stand at the pillory three times: on each occasion the crowd did not throw rotten fruit but instead handed him a substantial sum of money.

The story of the Cock Lane ghost became a national legend that was told to frighten children as well as being a cautionary tale. Charles Dickens alludes to it several times as do several other Victorian authors. The tale's popularity began to wane in the early twentieth century when it was superseded by some of the more spectacular supernatural stories coming out of the Spiritualist movement.

One of the more important and highly-debated points on the legitimacy of the Cock Lane Ghost happened almost a centuary after the sentences were levied against the Parsonists. In the Mid 1800s, searchers discovered the body of whom it is widely believed is Fanny Lynes. There was no sign of the Smallpox on the body, that her husband William Kent claimed she died of. However, her face was almost perfectly preserved, a defining feature on the corpses of those who died through arsenic overdose/poisoning, which was the method the Parsons said the supposed ghost claimed she had been murdered by William Kent.

Despite evidence pointing both to Parsonist innocence and Kent's guilt and to Parsonist guilt and Kent's innocence, it is impossible as of this time to determine which side is true. Wikipedia 2006

Garrick, David (1717-79)
British actor; Garrick and [w.html#woffington">Woffington</a> were amorously linked and lived together from 1742-45. Apparently Woffington never married and the "Mrs." was more along the lines of an honorary title. Although Garrick married in 1749 and remained so until his death there seems some evidence that he retained an attachment to Woffington (e.g. he wore the shoe buckles she gave him until his death). He was also author of the play, Florizel and Perdita, "A Dramatic Pastoral, in Three Acts."; Garrick was also a pupil of Dr. Samuel Johnson and a member of his literary club, along with James Boswell and others. Garrick Quotes; 405

bum-boat
bumboat ( ) n. A small boat used to peddle provisions to ships anchored offshore. [Probably partial translation of Low German bumboot , ship's boat]

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Pope Joan
Pope Joan is the name of a female pope who supposedly reigned for less than two years in the 850s,[1] based on a legend that circulated in the Middle Ages.[citation needed] Pope Joan is regarded by most modern historians and religion scholars as fictitious, possibly originating as an anti-papal satire, but her existence is still debated. Wikipedia

Piquet
Piquet is a card game for two players, using a shortened pack of 32 cards which omits 2 to 6 in each suit. In ascending order, the cards rank 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A (high). A number of French terms are traditionally used for various features of the game and these are included below.
A game consists of a set of 6 deals called a partie, with the deal alternating. Each player is dealt 12 cards, with 8 left as a talon. A deal consists of three parts: discarding a number of cards and replacing them from the talon to try to improve the hand, declaring various features in the hand, and then playing the cards in tricks.
Piquet is a very old game. It was well established by 1650 with similar rules to the present ones (it differed in using a 36 card pack with a 12 card talon, elder hand being allowed to change 7 cards, and a partie was ended by the first to reach 100, a variant still sometimes played). It was mentioned by Rabelais in 1535 although whether this was the same game is unclear. It has retained its popularity to the present day as one of the best and most skilful card games for two players. The rules described are those published by Cavendish in 1882.

A parlour game is a group game played indoors. During the Victorian era in Great Britain and in the USA, these games were extremely popular among the upper and middle classes. They were often played in a parlour, hence the name.
There are a variety of historic Parlour Games and Pynchon here seems to be defining this one in the subsequent lines. But one old possibly relevant version for M & D was called Consequences: Consequences is an old parlour game similar to the surrealist game exquisite corpse or Mad Libs.[1]

Each person takes a turn choosing a word for one of six questions, in this order.

Man's name

Woman's name

Place name

A comment

Another comment

An outcome

Then the story is read: #1 met #2 at #3, and he said #4, she said #5, and the consequence was #6. In some versions of the game the man gets to reply to the woman, thus the consequence moves to #7. Another version includes 'the world said' at #7, which is meant to represent the response of the public to the consequence.

This exact phrase is repeated in Against the Day. P. 567 "four-door farce". One of the recurring physical jokes in such plays involves sets with many doors and people coming in and out, just missing each other. A French writer, George Feydeau, was famous for writing them at the time of ATD, which makes the possible pun on his last name--Feydeau, four-door--anachronous in M & D but still resonant, perhaps. See a modern example, Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up Doc?, the movie.

Some of us are Outlaws, and some Trespassers upon the very world
Pynchonian thematic....of course, Trespassers are part of the plot of Against The Day.

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Morning Tussah
tus·sah (tŭs'ə, tŭs'ô') also tus·sore (tŭs'ôr', -ōr') n. An Asian silkworm, the larva of a large saturniid moth (Antheraea paphia), that produces a coarse brownish or yellowish silk. The silk produced by this worm or a fabric woven from it. [Hindi tasar, from Sanskrit tasaram, shuttle (probably from the shape of its cocoon).]

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buzz-men
slang for pickpockets

Prie-Dieux
custom-built Church kneelers

quotinoctian
occurring every night