Notes and Queries, Number 181, April 16, 1853 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

This edition opens with careful transcriber notes that guide the listener through occasional Greek terms, overlined abbreviations and the original spelling quirks of a seventeenth‑century pamphlet. The core of the discussion is “The Shepherd of Banbury’s Weather‑Rules,” a modest manual that once guided country folk in predicting rain, caring for livestock and interpreting the sky’s moods. Its popularity endured for generations, even as doubts grew about whether the titular shepherd ever truly existed.

The essay then unravels a tangled web of bibliographic errors that have long obscured the work’s true origins. By tracing references from the Biographia Britannica to later antiquarian studies, the author argues that Dr. John Campbell merely republished the 1670 text, while the original author—identified on the title page as John Clearidge—remained hidden. The piece aims to set the record straight and restore the shepherd’s place among England’s rural writers.