Mind your language: Long length

While thinking of socks for my husband, I sat up when I read a sentence in the Autobiography of the extraordinary Anne Murray. She, having helped disguise James Duke of York in a woman’s dress (‘very pretty in itt’), for him to escape the Roundheads in 1648, found that she herself had to escape the attentions of the Cromwellian double-agent John Bampfield, who wanted to marry her, swearing his wife was dead, which she began to doubt.

So she settled at the castle of Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, using her amateur medical skills to treat wounded soldiers and others, including ‘a man that had a horne on the left side of the hinder part of his head, betwixt 4 and 5 inches aboutt and two inches long, and his wife told mee shee had cutt the lengh of her finger off (as shee usually did) when two or three days before hee came to mee, because the weight of itt was troublesome’.