It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards.

It is not the minute quantity of French brandy, which I take purely upon the advice of my medical man, who pronounces it a sovereign alexipharmacal against the vapours, it is that Mr. Fitzgeorge has again offered to place me in an establishment which

[Y]ou, with your errabund guesses, veering to all points of the literary compass, amused the many-humoured yet single-minded Pantagruelist, …

We think of broilsome Norman lords — and so they were — but in their broilsomeness and insecurity they sought, and even abided by, tenure decisions lent legitimacy by the elevation to the inheritance of one of a finite number of 'rightful' heirs.