HAY, GILBERT, or “Sir Gilbert the Haye” (fl. 1450), Scottish poet and translator, was perhaps a kinsman of the house of Errol. If he be the student named in the registers of the university of St Andrews in 1418–1419, his birth may be fixed about 1403. He was in France in 1432, perhaps some years earlier, for a “Gilbert de la Haye” is mentioned as present at Reims, in July 1430, at the coronation of Charles VII. He has left it on record, in the Prologue to his Buke of the Law of Armys, that he was “chaumerlayn umquhyle to the maist worthy King Charles of France.” In 1456 he was back in Scotland, in the service of the chancellor, William, earl of Orkney and Caithness, “in his castell of Rosselyn,” south of Edinburgh. The date of his death is unknown.
Hay is named by Dunbar (q.v.) in his Lament for the Makaris, and by Sir David Lyndsay (q.v.) in his Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo. His only political work is The Buik of Alexander the Conquerour, of which a portion, in copy, remains at Taymouth Castle. He has left three translations, extant in one volume (in old binding) in the collection of Abbotsford: (a) The Buke of the Law of Armys or The Buke of Bataillis, a translation of Honoré Bonet’s Arbre des batailles; (b) The Buke of the Order of Knichthood from the Livre de l’ordre de chevalerie; and (c) The Buke of the Governaunce of Princes, from a French version of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum. The second of these precedes Caxton’s independent translation by at least ten years.
For the Buik of Alexander see Albert Herrmann’s The Taymouth Castle MS. of Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik, &c. (Berlin, 1898). The complete Abbotsford MS. has been reprinted by the Scottish Text Society (ed. J. H. Stevenson). The first volume, containing The Buke of the Law of Armys, appeared in 1901. The Order of Knichthood was printed by David Laing for the Abbotsford Club (1847). See also S.T.S. edition (u.s.) “Introduction” and Gregory Smith’s Specimens of Middle Scots, in which annotated extracts are given from the Abbotsford MS., the oldest known example of literary Scots prose.
HAY, JOHN (1838–1905), American statesman and author,
was born at Salem, Indiana, on the 8th of October 1838. He
graduated from Brown University in 1858, studied law in the
office of Abraham Lincoln, was admitted to the bar in Springfield,
Illinois, in 1861, and soon afterwards was selected by
President Lincoln as assistant private secretary, in which
capacity he served till the president’s death, being associated
with John George Nicolay (1832–1901). Hay was secretary of
the U.S. legation at Paris in 1865–1867, at Vienna in 1867–1869
and at Madrid in 1869–1870. After his return he was for five
years an editorial writer on the New York Tribune; in 1879–1881
he was first assistant secretary of state to W. M. Evarts;
and in 1881 was a delegate to the International Sanitary Conference,
which met in Washington, D.C., and of which he was
chosen president. Upon the inauguration of President McKinley
in 1897 Hay was appointed ambassador to Great Britain, from
which post he was transferred in 1898 to that of secretary of
state, succeeding W. R. Day, who was sent to Paris as a member
of the Peace Conference. He remained in this office until his
death at Newburg, New Hampshire, on the 1st of July 1905.
He directed the peace negotiations with Spain after the war of
1898, and not only secured American interests in the imbroglio
caused by the Boxers in China, but grasped the opportunity
to insist on “the administrative entity” of China; influenced
the powers to declare publicly for the “open door” in China;
challenged Russia as to her intentions in Manchuria, securing
a promise to evacuate the country on the 8th of October 1903;
and in 1904 again urged “the administrative entity” of China
and took the initiative in inducing Russia and Japan to “localize
and limit” the area of hostilities. It was largely due to his tact
and good management, in concert with Lord Pauncefote, the
British ambassador, that negotiations for abrogating the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty and for making a new treaty with Great Britain
regarding the Isthmian Canal were successfully concluded at the
end of 1901; subsequently he negotiated treaties with Colombia
and with Panama, looking towards the construction by the
United States of a trans-isthmian canal. He also arranged the
settlement of difficulties with Germany over Samoa in December
1899, and the settlement, by joint commission, of the question
concerning the disputed Alaskan boundary in 1903. John Hay
was a man of quiet and unassuming disposition, whose training
in diplomacy gave a cool and judicious character to his statesmanship.
As secretary of state under Presidents McKinley
and Roosevelt his guidance was invaluable during a rather critical
period in foreign affairs, and no man of his time did more to
create confidence in the increased interest taken by the United
States in international matters. He also represented, in another
capacity, the best American traditions—namely in literature.
He published Pike County Ballads (1871)—the most famous
being “Little Breeches”—a volume worthy to rank with Bret
Harte, if not with the Lowell of the Biglow Papers; Castilian
Days (1871), recording his observations in Spain; and a volume
of Poems (1890); with John G. Nicolay he wrote Abraham Lincoln:
A History (10 vols., 1890), a monumental work indispensable
to the student of the Civil War period in America, and published
an edition of Lincoln’s Complete Works (2 vols., 1894). The
authorship of the brilliant novel The Breadwinners (1883) is now
certainly attributed to him. Hay was an excellent public speaker:
some of his best addresses are In Praise of Omar; On the
Unveiling of the Bust of Sir Walter Scott in Westminster
Abbey, May 21, 1897; and a memorial address in honour of
President McKinley.
The best of his previously unpublished speeches appeared in Addresses of John Hay (1906).
HAY, a town of Waradgery county, New South Wales,
Australia, on the Murrumbidgee river, 454 m. by rail W.S.W. of
Sydney. Pop. (1901), 3012. It is the cathedral town of the
Anglican diocese of Riverina, the terminus of the South Western
railway, and the principal depot for the wool produced at the
numerous stations on the banks of the Murrumbidgee and
Lachlan rivers.
HAY, a market town and urban district of Breconshire,
south Wales, on the Hereford and Brecon section of the Midland
railway, 16412 m. from London, 20 m. W. of Hereford and
17 m. N.E. of Brecon by rail. Pop. (1901), 1680. The Golden
Valley railway to Pontrilas (1834 m.), now a branch of the Great
Western, also starts from Hay. The town occupies rising ground
on the south (right) bank of the Wye, which here separates
the counties of Brecknock and Radnor but immediately below
enters Herefordshire, from which the town is separated on the
E. by the river Dulas.
Leland and Camden ascribe a Roman origin to the town, and the former states that quantities of Roman coin (called by the country people “Jews’ money”) and some pottery had been found near by, but of this no other record is known. The Wye valley in this district served as the gate between the present counties of Brecknock and Hereford, and, though Welsh continued for two or three centuries after the Norman Conquest to be the spoken language of the adjoining part of Herefordshire south of the Wye (known as Archenfield), there must have been a “burh” serving as a Mercian outpost at Glasbury, 4 m. W. of Hay, which was itself several miles west of Offa’s Dyke. But the earliest settlement at Hay probably dates from the Norman conquest of the district by Bernard Newmarch about 1088 (in which year he granted Glasbury, probably as the first fruits of his invasion, to St Peter’s, Gloucester). The manor of Hay, which probably corresponded to some existing Welsh division, he gave to Sir Philip Walwyn, but it soon reverted to the donor, and its subsequent devolution down to its forfeiture to the crown as part of the duke of Buckingham’s estate in 1521, was identical with that of the lordship of Brecknock (see Breconshire). The castle, which was probably built in Newmarch’s time and rebuilt by his great-grandson William de Breos, passed on the latter’s attainder to the crown, but was again seized by de Breos’s second son, Giles, bishop of Hereford, in 1215, and retaken by King John in the following year. In 1231 it was burnt by Llewelyn ab Iorwerth, and in the Barons’ War it was taken in 1263 by Prince Edward, but in the following year was burnt by Simon Montfort and the last Llewelyn. From the 16th century the castle has been used as a private residence.
