Note 45 — Chapter X · Difficulties of the Folklorist

The Welsh spelling is caws pob, ‘baked (or roasted) cheese,’ so called in parts of South Wales, such as Carmarthenshire, whereas in North Wales it is caws pobi. It is best known to Englishmen as ‘Welsh rabbit,’ which superior persons ‘ruling the roast’ in our kitchens choose to make into rarebit: how they would deal with ‘Scotch woodcock’ and ‘Oxford hare,’ I do not know. I should have mentioned that copies of the Hundred Mery Talys are exceedingly scarce, and that the above, which is the seventy-sixth in the collection, has here been copied from the Cymmrodor, iii. 115–6, where we have the following sapient note:—‘Cause bobe, it will be observed, is St. Peter’s rendering of the phrase Caws wedi ei bobi. The chief of the Apostles apparently had only a rather imperfect knowledge of Welsh, which is not to be wondered at, as we know that even his Hebrew was far from giving satisfaction to the priests of the capital.’ From these words one can only say that St. Peter would seem to have known Welsh far better than the author of that note, and that he had acquired it from natives of South Wales, perhaps from the neighbourhood of Kidwelly. I have to thank my friend Mr. James Cotton for a version of the cheese story in the Bodleian Library, namely in Malone MS. 19 (p. 144), where a certain master at Winchester School has put it into elegiacs which make St. Peter cry out with the desired effect: Tostus io Walli, tostus modo caseus. ↑