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.