Note 4 — Chapter IX · —THE BANQUET.

"There is a laughable tradition," says Nichols, "still generally current in Lancashire, that our knight-making monarch knighted at the banquet in Hoghton Tower a loin of beef; the part ever since called the sir-loin." And it is added by the same authority, "If the King did not give the sir-loin its name, he might, notwithstanding, have indulged in a pun on the already coined word, the etymology of which was then, as now, as little regarded as the thing signified is well approved."—Nichols's Progresses of James I., vol. iii.