Anglo-Norman words

(This 'word of the month' is written by Maud Becker, Ph.D. student and part of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary Project) ( The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 78 D40) Hunting was one of the favourite pastimes of the medieval nobility, and this is reflected in the great number of treatises written, both in Latin and in the vernacular, about hunting in general, and, more specifically, about the fine art of falconry. In about 1079, William the Conqueror decided to designate a large portion of the country as the royal forest or hunting space – what is still known nowadays as the New Forest – much to the frustration of the English, as the following passage of the Continuation of the  Brut , illustrates: Meis quant il pout repos aver, Volentiers volt solacer E a bois e a river. Deduit quere sovent, Meis a ceo ke lui fust avis Les forez furent trop petiz. Plus voleit aver salvagin E as bestes norir plus de guastin. Pur enlargir son deduit, Un grant païs ...

In the first edition of the AND we find the entry quyn (currently also online, until work on the second edition of Q- is completed, sometime in 2015). The word is defined as ‘(term of abuse) monkey’ and is illustrated by a single attestation from Nicholas Bozon’s Life of Saint Margaret : ‘Ceo ke avint de celi mal quyn ’ (l. 303) Sister M. Amelia Klenke published her edition of Bozon’s text in 1947, and translated this particular line somewhat oddly as ‘That which befell this luckless fellow (evil monkey)’. The ‘luckless fellow’ in question is Malchus, the executioner instructed to behead St. Margaret of Antioch. After a vision of a white dove bearing a cross, Malchus had come to the realisation that St. Margaret was favoured by God and consequently he refused to carry out the execution. It is only at her insistence that he beheads her: ‘Si vu ne mettez mayn en moys, Parte de ciel ne averez o moy’ (ll. 299-300) ‘If you do no lay hand upon me You shall have no part...

            At first glance, the entry for ongler seemed to be straightforward. As the verbal form of the noun ungle ‘(finger)-nail’, it is attested in Continental French with the sense of ‘to scratch’. Godefroy has one attestation of the infinitive in a glossary from 1660 (5,603) and a number of examples of the use of the past participle (also attested once in the DMF sub ongler ) illustrate a heraldic use of the term, which can also be found in English – attested once in English as ongled (OED sub ongle , n.) but normally found as unguled (OED sub unguled , adj.) meaning ‘having the hoofs or claws of a different tincture from the body’. The FEW (14,40b sub ungula ) has an attestation of the verb ongler as a v.a. from 1531 glossed as ‘déchirer (qn) avec des ongles de fer (t. de torture)’ and notes the presence of the word in Cotgrave’s dictionary with the sense of ‘griffer avec les ongles’.          ...

For the modern reader, the words ‘locust’ and ‘lobster’ refer to two very different species of the animal kingdom and at first glance they do not seem to have much in common. ‘Locust’ (the modern English word for an insect associated with migrating hordes that ravage whole areas of countryside, especially in Africa and Asia, by consuming all vegetation in their path) derives from the Old French and Anglo-Norman word  locuste  ( DMF locuste , from Latin  locusta : ‘insect’, locust’, ‘grasshopper’). It is hardly surprising that several textual references we have to locusts in Anglo-Norman sources are from religious texts, as locusts are alluded to not only as one of the plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament Exodus (Ex. 10:1-20) but also as one of the horrors inflicted upon the earth in the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation (Revelation 9:3-10), the last book of the New Testament. One such text is an illustrated Apocalypse commentary from the thirteenth cen...

In an Anglo-Norman prose lapidary from the second half of the thirteenth century – a study of the medical ‘powers’ of different stones and minerals, claiming to derive its knowledge from a letter which  the mysterious Arabian king Evax  wrote  to Emperor Tiberius – we find the following recommendation: “La rousse [celidoine] est bone a houme qui chiet de passion et a home lunage”  Lapid  149.xxvi.7 (“The red [chelidonius] (=a small stone taken from the gizzard of a swallow) is good for someone who suffers epilepsy and for a ‘lunatic’ person”) Leaving aside the question of how effective the use of a piece of red chelidonius would have been in these matters, we would like to concentrate on the word lunage . The adjective derives from lune  (Latin luna : ‘moon’), followed by the (normally substantival) suffix - age , and is the Anglo-Norman equivalent to Latin lunaticus . This particular word formation is no longer extant in Modern French ...

At this time of year, our thoughts turn to Christmas foods – particularly to sweets and confections. A search of the use of the term ‘sweetmeat’ in the AND2 (one can search the translations or glosses in the dictionary from the homepage) shows that an international array of sugary goods was available in medieval England. For those unfamiliar with the English term, sweetmeat is used to describe any kind of confectionary – candied fruit, nuts etc. – nothing ‘meaty’ involved despite the name – ‘meat’ is used here in the original sense of ‘food’ and not ‘flesh’. This should not be confused with the similar sounding sweetbread – which is definitely neither sweet nor bread! Even the OED can’t explain that one! Confection was the general term used in Anglo-Norman for any compound preparation – a mixture which included a number of ingredients. It was also used as a term for preserves, a mixture of fruit and sugar. From the Latin confectio , the word is attested in Middle English ...