Anthony Wood

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood. Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once. It appears in the fifth index, “Words,” printed in 1900 in a 400-page volume of indexes to Wood’s Life and Times edited by the indefatigable Andrew Clark, who claimed “a little space for words and spellings characteristic of Wood,” and for “a few minor subjects” not in the other indexes.