SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES

This article was downloaded by: [American Public University System]On: 19 February 2014, At: 12:08Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Mariner's MirrorPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmir20

SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICALETYMOLOGIESWilliam Sayers aa Collection development , Cornell University Library , New YorkPublished online: 22 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: William Sayers (2002) SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES, TheMariner's Mirror, 88:4, 405-422, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2002.10656860

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2002.10656860

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmir20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/00253359.2002.10656860

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2002.10656860

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

405SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIESThe Mariner’s Mirror Vol. 88 No. 4 (November 2002), 405-422

SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES

By William Sayers

The historical study of the vocabulary of technology displays a rather unevenrecord for most western European languages. Unless a word successfully makesthe jump, often via metaphor, into mainstream language, it may well never

become known to the larger speech community, and thus not come to the attentionof the lexicographer or, later, philologist. Specialized glossaries may be compiled byanthropologists, folklorists or amateurs of traditional but threatened crafts and trades,but even inclusion in standard dictionaries with a mention of Tech. or Obs. will notsave a word from loss when the technology where it was once at home has succumbedto obsolescence.

This said, some technical vocabularies have been better preserved than others,and here we must count the language of the sea and sailing. Sail propulsion and itsattendant vocabulary won a reprieve even when superseded by steam in the militaryand commercial domains because of the continuing appeal of sport and leisure sailing.Other difficult-to-quantify factors such as the ‘romance of the sea’ and the appeal ofspecialized vocabularies to the initiate, here heightened by a thorough set of seagoingalternatives to land-based lexical praxis (which can parallel the practice of tabu butneed not have its origin there) that distinguish the insider from the ignorant, thesailor from the landlubber, have also maintained a limited but vital interest in, andthus currency of, the traditional language of sailing.

But tracing this vocabulary to its origins is seldom a straightforward matter. InEurope, technological transfer has never been impeded by language boundaries. Thevery nature of sailing and trade, by bringing the concrete evidence of ships, qualifiedinformants and the attendant terminology into the midst of potential host cultures,has resulted in a multitude of lexical loans and calques, some even extending alongthe entire northern Atlantic seaboard. Many English terms have experienced a morecomplicated development than appearances – or standard reference works – maysuggest. Several linguistic communities may be involved; loans and calques may besubjected to the ‘normalizing’, accommodating effects of folk etymology. In thefollowing notes, a disparate group of nautical and maritime terms is studied withparticular attention to their status in the Middle Ages and in many cases their northernEuropean antecedents.

LODEMAN, OFR. LOMAN ‘PILOT’Layamon’s Brut from about 1220 offers the first documented instance of MiddleEnglish lödesman ‘pilot’ (later forms are lodeman, loadsman, and so on).1 The Brut isthe reworking of Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut, which in turn goes back toGeoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. In the less well-known

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4

406 SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES

pre-Arthurian portion of the history, King Gorgwint of Britain is redirecting a groupof would-be immigrants to the then unsettled island of Ireland: ‘Ah ye scullen habbenlœdesmen, and forð ye scullen liðen’ (‘You shall have pilots and forth you shall go’).2

Wace’s text does not have an exact precedent for the king’s speech nor the term forpilot, but offers equivalent information: ‘E reis Gurguint lur ad livré / De ses mariniersquis menerent’ (‘and King Gurguint assigned them some of his sailors who guidedthem’).3 Of importance for the following discussion, there can be little doubt in eitherthe French or English text that maritime pilots, not simple guides, are meant.

Lodeman, lodesman and variants occur in later literary texts and, of particularinterest, in English administrative records and documentation written either inAnglo-French or in a Latin to which many vernacular terms have been added.4 Notthe oldest but perhaps the best edited from a philological point of view is the OakBook of Southampton from about 1300. The text lists divisions of the Atlantic coastlineas concerns pilots’ areas of competence and, we might say somewhat anachronistically,licensed area of operation:

Une neff frette a Burdeux ou aillours, et vient a sa charge, et fount chartre partye, towage etpetit lodmans sount sour les marchaunz. En la costere de Bretayne, touz ceux qe l’em prentpuys qe l’en ad passe les debaat, ou sont petitz lodmans; et ceux de Normandye etd’Engletere, [puys qe l’en ad passe Calays; et ceux d’Escoce,] puys qe l’em passe Jernesye;et ceux de Fflandre, puys qe l’em passe Calays; et ceux d’Escoce, puys qe l’em passeJernemouth. Et c’est le jugement en cest cas.5

Punctuation and capitalization reflect current editing practices and the square bracketsset off what the editor has identified as a dittoism and resultant corrupt segmentcommon to many manuscripts. (For present purposes, I pass quickly over editorialproblems.) The passage may be translated as follows:

A ship is freighted at Bordeaux or elsewhere, and comes to her place of lading and acharter-party is made; towage and petty [= coastal] pilots are a charge upon the merchants.On the coast of Brittany all those whom they take on after they have passed the Isle of Baas[in Léon, Brittany] are [considered] petty pilots, and those of Normandy and Englandafter they have passed Guernsey, and those of Flanders after they have passed Calais, andthose of Scotland after they have passed Yarmouth. And this is the judgment in this case.6

In the Black Book of the Admiralty we read: ‘la nez, non li avers de la nef, paiet loquillage et lo grant lomant’ (‘The ship and not the cargo of the ship pays the keelagedues and the great [= sea] pilot’).7

A derivative is lamanage ‘pilotage’, best known from Chaucer’s portrait of theShipman:

But of his craft to rekene wel his tydes,His stremes and his daungers him bisydes,His herberwe and his mone, his lodenenage,Ther was noon swich from Hulle to Carthage.8

Both lodeman and lodemanage are found in Latinate dress in documents fromAnglo-Norman Britain and Ireland. The latter is attested in Ireland from as early as1212, half a century after the landing of the Cambrio- and Anglo-Normans.9

The nautical terminology of early Normandy and post-Conquest Britain displaysmany ties with the Norse world. Some 40 terms of Norse origin are found in the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4

407SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES

Norman French of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries as a consequence of the latetenth-century colonization of Normandy, the transfer of naval technology, tradeand, for a century or more, political contacts with Scandinavia.10 In the Littere Walliewe find a shipment of fish recorded for 14 November 1283, sent by William deReyngge, sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, for the King’s use in Anglesey (No. 357, p.204): ‘Graunte est ensement a meme le marenir par couenaunt qe les costages renablesqe il mettra en lodmanage e en towage par seon serment ly seit alowe’ (‘It is similarlygranted to the same mariner under this agreement that reasonable expenses, to beattested to under oath, that he will make for inshore pilotage and towage be allowed’).To lodmanage and towage we may compare the quillage mentioned in the abovequotation from Black Book of the Admiralty: ‘La nez, non li avers de la nef, paiet loquillage et lo grant lomant’. The term for keelage developed as follows: Old Norse(ON) kjôlr ‘keel’ > Anglo-Norman (AN) quille + the Gallo-Romance suffix -age.Towage is similarly constructed of ON taga ‘pull, haul’.

But unlike these two Norse derivations, lodeman, lodemanage would appear atfirst glance to be direct descendants of Old English lädman and the phonologicaldevelopment of the base word would be the normal one (discounting the foreignsuffix). But OE lädman means simply ‘guide, leader’, with no maritime connotation,in its rare occurrence in an early translation of the Bible.11 It is not attested in the OldEnglish poetic lexicon, despite the recurrent motifs of exile and seafaring. Underwhat circumstances, then, did it by the thirteenth century experience the semanticnarrowing and vocational application that turned a general guide into a specializedmaritime pilot?

I suggest that this evolution occurred in the context of cross-Channel trade andtravel, and through the medium of French. In Anglo-Norman and French textsadmittedly later than Layamon’s we find lodman, locman, loman, laman, lamen,even a lamaneur, where the notion of agent originally expressed in -man has beenobscured and reduplicated in -eur. Middle Dutch lootsman has been proposed as thesource of the French term.12 The relatively late first recorded instance of the term(1644) would not of itself discredit this thesis, but it is difficult to account for thesupposed reduction of the internal consonant cluster -tsm-.

Numerous nautical terms in Norman French of Norse derivation, many neatlygathered in Wace’s description of Arthur’s embarkation for Gaul in the Brut, plusquillage and towage would authorize us to look northwards for the source of a loanon the model of ON stýrismaðr ‘helmsman’, which appears in Norman French asesturman. But leiðsôgumaðr, lit. ‘way-sayer’, cannot be seen as a likely progenitor ofNorman and French loman/laman, despite the very substantial phonologicalreduction of other terms in their passage from Norse to Norman, for examplehôfuðbenda lit. ‘head tie’, that is, ‘shroud’ > hauban.

The semantic development of lodeman may be accounted for by proposing thatOld English lädman entered French, no doubt Norman French, pre- orpost-Conquest, in the specific sense of ‘English guide to English shores, estuariesand ports’. Otherwise, cross-Channel lexical borrowing is almost exclusively one-way,French to English, and authenticated loans from English to French are very rare.Such a loan would testify to a considerable volume of commercial and other relations,a volume that we can only speculatively estimate on the basis of a variety of otherhistorical evidence. As the word underwent a predictable phonological development

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


in French, its semantic range seems to have expanded and the specific Englishconnotation been lost. This may have been coincident with the gain in the word’scurrency along a longer stretch of the Atlantic coast as it entered Breton (loman),Spanish (lemán), Galician and Portuguese accompanied by related terms for pilotage.Thus we find a text such as the Florentine merchant Pegolotti’s Pratica della mercaturaproviding an early fourteenth-century glossary of terms useful for traders in Atlanticwaters that lists ludumano and ludimannaggio ‘pilotage’.13

In England the Norman and French semantic value of loman, reintroduced toBritain after the conquest, seems to have attached itself to native English lode(s)man,whose phonology nevertheless derives directly from OE lädman. We shall meet thisphenomenon again.

MIDDLE ENGLISH, OLD NORMAN AND FRENCHTOP ‘MAST-TOP’Top (of the mast) and mast-top might well be thought straightforward derivationsfrom Old English top(p), and the absence of any attested use of the term in a nauticalcontext could be put down to the vagaries of the written record of the earliest English.But top as ‘mast-top’ is also found in medieval French under circumstances in whicha loan from Old or emerging Middle English is very unlikely. A sailing scene fromthe twelfth-century Anglo-Norman story of Protheselaus by Hue de Rotelande willestablish the context for a discussion of origins and semantic development. The passageis noteworthy for its technical vocabulary and the origin of many of its terms willprovide a clue in tracing top.

Although the setting is the Graeco-Roman world of antiquity, the ship portrayedshould be seen as the product of the Scandinavian shipbuilding tradition implantedin Normandy and reflected in the Bayeux Tapestry: a single mast with a single squaresail. Dardanus has failed to dissuade Protheselaus from a sea-journey and thenprovides him with a ship:

Il li trova mult bele nefOd bel mast, od riche tref,Ben atachee e ben bordee,Ben purtendue, bent teldee;N’ot plus bele desque en Tessaille,Ben est garnie de vitaille.Entret est Protheselaüs,Jubar, Mathan e neent plus.Cil Jubar est sis esquiersE si fu bons mariners;Il fu fiz un baron de France,Sis maistres ot estei d’enfance.Al tup unt lor sigle levé,Curent al vent e al oré.‘Sire,’ fait Jubar, ‘u en irrumE quel part cest lof turnerum.’14

He found him a very fine ship, with a sound mast and costly sail; it was well assembled andwell planked, well rigged and well tented. There was none finer from there to Thessaly. Itwas well stocked with food. Protheselaüs, Jubar, and Mathan went on board and no one

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


else. This Jubar was his squire and he was a good mariner. He was the son of a Frenchknight and had been his tutor since childhood. They raised their sail to the mast-top andran with a fair wind. ‘Sire,’ said Jubar, ‘where shall we go and in which direction shall I setour luff?’15

Protheselaus gives sailing instructions and the voyage begins well with fine weather.But then:

Li venz de l’altre part lor saltEn travers la nef, petit faitK’il ne l’ad tute reversee;Granz est li venz, la mer enflee,Li sigles est rompu parmi,Croist la naf, a poi ne fendi.Tost unt le sigle avalé,Tote nuit unt par mer wascré.A grant mesaise e a dolor,Desqu’al matin qu’il fu grant jor;Il ne sevent ou havne quere. (vv. 1447–57)

A wind from another quarter sprang up at them, striking the ship abeam, and it nearlycaused it to be overturned. The wind was strong and the sea was high. The sail split downthe middle, the ship’s timbers were breaking and the vessel was close to splitting in two.They quickly lowered the sail and were without steerage the whole night in great discomfortand anxiety, until the morning sun was well up. They did not know where to look for aharbour.

Among the nautical terms clearly deriving from or affected by old Norse arebordee, teldee, sigle, lof, wascré and havne, part of the corpus that accompanied thetransfer of shipbuilding technology from Scandinavia to Normandy in the late ninthcentury. To this list may be added tup. But before calling up a comparable scene innorthern waters, here is a brief excerpt from the old French romance Floire etBlancheflor. The setting is again the eastern Mediterranean but the ships are still thesquare-rigged, single-masted vessels of the Normans and Northmen:

Li vens fu boins, l’air orent cler,atant se sont empaint en mer;a retraiant, por avoir bort,toutes les nés issent du port.Le tref ont tost desharneskiéet sus dusc’a torés sacié;li vens s’i prent quis fait errer,atant es Flore en haute mer.16

The wind was good and the air clear and so they set to sea at once, on the ebb-tide untilthey should have steerage-way. All the ships left the port. They soon unfurled their sailsand drew them up to the top-castles. The wind filled the sails and thrust the ships forward.Flore was shortly on the high sea.

Here the mast is shown as carrying some form of topcastle (so reading torés). Anothermanuscript, however, offers the technologically less advanced ‘Leurs tres ont touzen haut sachiez / E sus desqu’es tups sachiez’ (‘They drew up all their sails and drewthem up to the mast-tops’).17

In ON the cognate of English top was toppr and it had the same general range of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


meanings as in English, including the meaning of tuft of hair on the top of the head.This meaning, too, was preserved in Norman French, and in Geimar’s Estoire desEngleis we find the spiteful William Rufus ordering that the fancy topknots orotherwise styled hair of his young courtiers be cut off.18 Toppr with a nautical referenceis also found in ON literature, albeit in a single narrative instance plus in a list froma treatise on poetics. In a collection of the Virgin’s miracles known as Mariusögur isa scene strikingly similar to that in Protheselaus, although the reality behind theliterary rendering must have been common enough in the North Atlantic:

Fra þvi er sagt, at abboti nauckr var a skipe med kaupmaunnum, enn þeir fengu vedrhaaskasamlict, sua at skip þeira meiddiz allt fyrir ofan sio, ok sue reif segl þeira allt miog Isundr. Fengu þeir hardla mikil aafaul af brauttum bylgium, þat ætlandi þaa ok þa, at skipitmundi kefia undir þeim med ollum farminum, ella mundi leysa I sundr I sua hordum siomed ofrafli vedrsins.19

It is told that a certain abbot took passage with merchants, and they ran into dangerousweather, so that their ship was all damaged by the force of the sea and then their sail splitinto shreds. Great waves crashed over the ship so that they thought that it would founderunder them with all the traders or would break up in such heavy seas and overpoweringweather.

The abbot advises the distraught merchants that they put their trust in Mary and hesings a responsory:

Ok iafnskiot sem responsorium er endadr, sa þeir biarta stiaurnu I alþycku uedri yfir siglutre.Aboti mælti, at þeir skyldu suo styra einart, at stiarna veri at sia yfir siglutopp (788f.).

And as soon as the responsory had ended, they saw a bright star in the dark skies above themast. The abbot said that they should steer so that the star was always visible above the mast-top.

Then with the Virgin, stella maris, as their guide they make their way safe and soundto port.

The word siglutoppr also occurs in a roughly versified catalogue of nautical termsattributed to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson. Nearly a hundred ship’s parts are solisted, and each of these, in the figure of metonymy, may stand for ‘ship’ in skaldicverse. There appear to be no true duplicates in the six stanzas devoted to componentparts (another four list names for kinds of ship, names of mythological ships, and soon), which assists in identification, often by a process of elimination, but context isof little help as terms appear to be grouped more for metrical purposes, creatingalliteration, than for semantic ones. The sixth stanza offers the following:

Söx, stæðingar, Stem railing, forebraces,svipting ok skaut, reef point and sheet,spíkr, siglutré, spike, (single-piece) mast,saumr, lekstólpar, row of nails, stern deck supports,laukr, siglutoppr, leek (= mast), mast-top,lína, eyru, line, earings (?),flaug, flaugarskegg pennant, pennant tailok farnagli.20 and hull plug.

Siglutoppr does, however, occur among other terms associated with the mast and itstop and there can be little doubt as to its correct identification or that the word wasin regular use.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


In the kind of development we saw earlier in OE lädman > ME lodeman, theNorse-derived top of Anglo-Norman French expanded the semantic field of Englishtop, admittedly in a fully predictible way, given the English word’s earlier semanticrange. It gained the additional specific meaning of ‘mast-top’ as well as entering intothe compound mast-top and nominal phrases with mast. Thus we find ME examplesfrom previously met sources such as Layamon: ‘Brutus … hihte hondlien kablen,teon seiles to toppa. (671); ‘þe maryneres … drawen sayl to top of mast And in toTrace seyleþ’;21 ‘I haue putt theym in a fair schipp … and lete drawe vp the sale to thetopp.’22

STUDDING SAILSomewhat abbreviated the OED entry for this term for a sail set beyond the leechesof any of the principal sails during a fair wind begins as follows:

Of obscure etymology. The earliest recorded form seems to point to adoption from MDutchor MLG. stôtinge, but this word is known only as n. of action from stôten to push, thrust,collide. Cf. however Dutch stootlap sail-lining, stootkant border, which have some affinityof sense with the Eng. word. It has been suggested that the synonymous OFr. estuinc,estoinc, estouin (mod.Fr. †estouine, 18th c.) may be an adoption of the Teut. word, themedial dental disappearing according to phonetic law. This, however, is not certain; theordinary Fr. word for studding-sail is bonnette à étui, which suggests a derivation of estuincfrom estui (mod.Fr. étui).23

The earliest attestation given in the OED is from the 1549 Complaynt of Scotland:‘The galliasse pat furtht hir stoytene sales.’24

By way of introduction to untravelling this apparently tangled etymology, I wouldchallenge the OED’s claim that in OFr., more properly Norman French, estuincdesignated an auxiliary sail. Wace gives a very full account of a fleet setting sail in hisRoman de Brut and it is in the nature of the catalogue or list device which he employsthat no terms will be repeated or duplicated. As Wace pays special attention to thesails and rigging, we then have highly contextualized evidence on which to draw indetermining the meaning of this first recorded instance of estuinc. After a passagedevoted to the lading and rigging of the ships, Arthur’s fleet begins its Channel crossingto Gaul and the sails are then trimmed:

Pur le vent es trés acuillirFunt les lispruez avant tenirEt bien former es raelinges.Tels i ad traient les guidinges,Et alquant abaissent le trefPur la nef curre plus süef.Estuïns ferment et escotesEt funt tendre les cordes tutes,Uitages laschent, trés avalent,Boëlines sachent et halent,Al vent guardent et as esteilles,Sulunc l’uré portent lur veilles;Les braiols funt lacier al mastQue li venz par desuz ne past;A dous ris curent u a treis. (Il. 11, 219-33)

In order to gather the wind into the sailsThey brace the leech-spars to the foreAnd fix them solidly into the leeches.There are some who pull the buntlines,And lower the yard slightly,So that the ship may run more smoothly.They secure the estuins and the sheets,And make all the ropes fast,They release the halyards, bring down the yards,Tighten the bowlines and haul,They check the wind and the stars,And trim their sails according to the breeze;They lash the brails to the mastSo that the wind does escape past it;They run under two reefs or three.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


In the immediate context of the term estuins, left untranslated above, we are clearlydealing with rigging not with sails, and there is no evidence, literary or iconographical,for the use of auxiliary sails at this early date (mid-twelfth century). I derive estuincfrom ON stœðing, a relatively infrequent word which in the nautical context wouldappear to refer to a fore-brace.25 It occurs in the earlier cited stanza from Snorri.Fore-braces seem to have been used in short and choppy seas when the mast wasexposed to additional strain, conditions frequent in the Channel. The regular Norsebraces were called aktaumar, which, curiously, is without a Norman reflex. But thebasic idea of stœðing is ‘support’, as expressed by the verb stoða ‘stay, support, back’but also ‘help, assist’.

ON stœðing has a reflex in Middle English as well as Norman French. In hisinvaluable Middle English Sea Terms, Sandahl gives a wealth of examples, the earliestfrom the late thirteenth century and many from shipyard inventories, of a type ofcordage used to control the yard called stetings or stedings. The laconic first mentionreads: ‘vnam Cordam que dicitur steting’ and is dated to 1294–5.26 The phonologicalreduction of stœðing to estuinc, perfectly straightforward in Norman and French,means that the Norman term cannot lie behind Middle English steting/steding. Wemust rather imagine either an Anglo-Norse reflex of stœðing entering the Englishnautical vocabulary or the semantics Old English stod, studu ‘support’ (cf. Mod.Eng. stud) and derivatives picking up an echo of the Scandinavian term.

But what is the relationship between preventer brace and studding sail, betweenthe stetings/stedings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the stoytene salesof the mid-sixteenth? Sandahl and the earlier commentators in this journal whom hecites believed that when sailing conditions were fine and did not require the use ofadditional braces to stabilize the yard, the rope could be exploited to rig additionalsail to the end of the yard. And we are to understand that the term steting/stedingfollowed to this new application. I do not find this alternating use of the rope veryconvincing. And why should a parallel lexical transfer also have occurred in French,where estuinc ‘forebrace’ appears to lie behind bonnette en étui ‘studding sail’?27 Thedocumentation assembled by Sandahl also suggests that stetings were dropped fromuse (or at a minimum were no longer called by that name) at about the same time asstudding sails were introduced. I judge this to have been a coincidental, not causal,relationship, even though both brace and studding sail are associated with the yard.I rather believe that the original semantic value of ON stœðing ‘support, ancillarydevice’ was preserved in both English and French, and transferred from auxiliarybrace to auxiliary sail. In English this seems to have occurred when the word stetingwas ‘freed up’ for new use by the renaming of yard stabilizers (for example, asyard-ropes).

ANGLO-NORM. UITAGES, ME UPTIES ‘HALYARDS’The yard and single square sail of the Scandinavian ships which reached sites thatwould later be Normandy, the Danelaw and the port towns of Ireland were raisedwith a single rope, called dragreip in ON. Drag and rope are the readily apparentEnglish cognates. But in Norse, reip would have designated a line made of leather,not plant fibre or hair. Walrus hide was preferentially used in this application becauseof its strength. It thereby became a valuable trading item, no less prized than walrus

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


ivory, as evidenced in Alfred’s account in Old English of the Norwegian merchantOhthere’s northern trading voyages.28

Given the high incidence of Norse-derived terms in the Norman French nauticallexicon and the prominence of a nearly complete set of terms for the standing andrunning rigging there, it is rather surprising that dragreip has no known reflex inNorman French and that the term for halyard is consistently found in the plural.Firstly, a pair of narrative examples will associate terminology and concrete realitywith a fair measure of certainty. Again, we may turn to the Jerseyman Wace and hispicture of Arthur, citing again those verses devoted exclusively to sail-trimming:

Tels i ad traient les guidinges,Et alquant abaissent le trefPur la nef curre plus süef.Estuïns ferment et escotesEt funt tendre les cordes tutes,Uitages laschent, trés avalent,Boëlines sachent et halent, (11, 207–13)

Since Wace is describing an entire fleet, we need not try to resolve all this activity asoccurring on the deck of a single ship, or at the same time. But on one ship, at least,the halyards (uitages) are released and the sail and yard brought down. Other textsoffer the variants utage, utange, witage, uistages, utacque and are assumed to berelated to Mod.Fr itague.

Much of the same sail-trimming activity and its attendant vocabulary is found ina sailing scene in Guillaume de Berneville’s Vie de Saint Gilles. The future St Gilleshas spotted a ship in distress; his faith and God’s intervention calm the storm and thegrateful merchants offer him passage, under now perfect sailing conditions:

Le jur fud bel, le solail cler,La mer fud paisible e le ventA la nef vunt ignelement;Lez sunt del bel tens ke il unt.Traient lur ancres, si s’en vunt.A plein se astent d’eschiper,Kar mult coveitent le passer.Bons fud li venz e la mer quieie:Ne lur estoet muver lur greie,Ne n’i out la nuit lof cloé,Estuinc trait ne tref gardé,Ne n’i out halé bagordinge,Ne escote ne scolaringe;Ne fud mester de boesline;Tute fud queie la marine:Ne lur estut pas estricher,Ne tendre tref ne helenger.Fort ert l’estai e li hobentKi fermé furent devers lé vent,E d’autre part devers le bortSunt li nodras e li bras fort;Bones utanges out el tref,Meillurs n’estot a nule nef,

There are some who pull the buntlines,And lower the yard slightly,So that the ship may run more smoothly.They secure the forebraces and the sheets,And make all the ropes fast,They release the halyards, bring down the yards,Tighten the bowlines and haul,

The day was fine, the sun bright,The sea was peaceful and the windsCame briskly to the ship;[The mariners] are happy at the fine weather they have.They haul up their anchors, and depart.They are in a great hurry to set sail,Because they are anxious to complete the passage.The wind was fair and the sea calm;They had no need to trim their gear,Nor was there that night a luff pinned in place,Brace tightened nor yard watched,Nor were there brails hauled,Nor sheet nor spilling line;There was no need for a bowline;The seascape was entirely calm:They did not have to strike sail,Nor tauten the sail nor adjust the tiller.Strong were the stay and the shroudsThat were pulled tight to windward,And elsewhere, deckside,Are the strong replacement spars;The yard had good halyards,There were none better on any vessel;

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


Bons fud li tref e la nef fort,E unt bon vent ki tost les port.Tute noit current a la luneLe tref windé trés k’a la hune:Ne lur estut muver funainTrestute nuit ne l’endemain.Lur aire vunt od la mer pleine,Kar issi veit cil ke Deus meine.29

Here we meet a number of familiar terms and some new ones.30 So let us focus onthe yard: ‘Bones utanges out el tref /…/ Tute noit current a la lune / Le tref windétrés k’a la hune’. The verb winder derives from ON vinda ‘wind, hoist’ and points tothe presence of a windlass on board. A slightly later scene shows the tired Gilleslying asleep on deck, next to the steersman and windlass. We may thus assume thehalyards to have run well to the rear of the ship, near the tiller. Here they may alsohave served in place of a separate back stay.

Wace’s Roman de Brut is dated to about 1155 and Guillaume de Berneville’s lifeof Gilles to about 1170. The first Middle English equivalents to Norman Frenchuitages are found in inventory records from the first half of the thirteenth century,for example ‘et pro aliis cordis Vpteiis et aliis attiliis cordarum x.m.’31 Sandahl notesa considerable number of variants, all fairly transparent but none – to anticipatesomewhat the later discussion – suggestive of Norman French uitages. Sandahl’sremarks are worth quoting at some length:

The various ME forms above can all be satisfactorily explained from OE up + tëgan ‘to tie’or from up + the noun tëah, tëg, tëg ‘tie.’ … an uptie then being a rope that ties up the yard …

ON taug, which corresponds to OE tëag, has been suggested as the second element of theFrench word for ‘tie’, itague, OF utage, hutage, AN [Anglo-Norman] uitage, utange, etc.… (III.124)

Sandahl is rightly suspicious of a conjectural ON *útstag to explain the presence of-s- in some Norman instances.32 An ‘out-stay’ would not designate the rope’s chieffunction, to raise the yard (or any other known function of rigging), and, as we haveseen, dragreip was the normal term in ON. ON stag is elsewhere attested in Normanas estai. Sandahl concludes as follows:

In my view, OF utage is to be regarded as an adaptation of ME uptie (uptegh) viaAnglo-Norman. Later F[rench] forms are to be regarded as corruptions of a word whosereal origin and sense had early been forgotten (124f.).

Against this several reservations may be raised, primarily as concerns semanticsin Middle English and the directionality of technological transfer. Uptie in the senseof a tie rope used to maintain an object at a height is tautological in the presentcontext since the yard would be ‘tied’ only when it was ‘up’, and the adverbial elementis superfluous (admitting that a lowered yard might be secured on deck in someother fashion). Secondly, to speak of securing the yard and sail omits all reference tothe actions of raising and lowering the yard, surely the most dynamic element of thewhole process. Turning to Sandahl’s comments on French forms, ON taug, whilecognate with OE tëag, is less a ‘tie’ than a ‘line’. Finally, the suggested direction ofthe lexical transfer, Middle English to Anglo-Norman, runs counter to most other

The yard (or sail) was good and the ship strong,And they have a fine wind that carries them quickly.The whole night they ran under the moon,The yard hoisted up to the masthead;There was no need for them to trim their riggingAll that night or the next day.They went their way with a full sea,For thus goes he whom God leads.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


lexical evidence and what we tentatively believe to have been the dominant thrust inthe transfer of nautical technology. But none of these cavils is sufficient to discreditSandahl’s several hypotheses, unless a better (and neater) explanation can be found.

It will be noted that Sandahl does not address the question of the consistentplural form for halyards in medieval French, and the first English shipyard lists canyield no insight into the rigging of individual ships. I offer a number of commentswhich, taken together, may explain the situation of uitages and upties. Dragreip maybe assumed to have been the standard term for a single halyard in Scandinavia but wemust recall that our written evidence comes from Norway and Iceland, not areasthat supplied the majority of settlers to Francia and England. In Old Danish, othernautical terminology may have been current, in particular if walrus-hide was notalways being used (and if weaker materials necessitated multiple lines to raise theyard).33 Further, adapting Scandinavian naval technology to the local conditions ofthe British and Norman coasts and the Channel may have entailed amendments tothis element of the rigging. In any case, an explanation for the plural form of theterm will have to be sought beyond the sphere of historical linguistics.

To cut to the heart of the etymological issue, I believe a compound, *ypptaug,was crafted of the ON verb yppa ‘to raise, lift’ and taug (pl. taugar) ‘line, rope’. Itmirrors dragreip semantically but points to a fibre composition. Like the categoricaldragreip, the term suggests the quintessential line on board, the principal element ofthe running rigging.

As for the phonological development, in Gallo-Romance the Latin labials p, vand b are lost when followed by a consonant other than r or l. The strongly frontedinitial y- of Old Norse would have been complemented by Gallo-Romance’s frontingof u and may account for some forms with initial ui-. As for the intrusive -s- which,it should be noted, is not everywhere found, I can only suggest the influence of suchrelated Norman nautical terms with initial vowel and consonant clusterc as estai‘stay’, escote ‘sheets’, estuinc ‘forebraces’, esturman ‘steersman’, from ON stag, skaut,stœðing and stýrismaðr, respectively.

In ME upties, folk etymology seems again to have been at work, whether on aNorman form evolving from ypptaugar to uitages or on an Anglo-Norse formexported from the Danelaw, so that the foreign components were replaced by thehandiest native English words, clarifying phonology and superficial semantics butleaving the lesser problem of why a halyard should be called a tie.

WAIST (OF A SHIP), FR. LA BELLE, AND EN BELLE ‘ABEAM’The waist of the sailing ships of some centuries ago was the longitudinal section ofthe hull between the quarterdeck in the stern and the forecastle in the bow. Thus, thewaist was not a narrow portion of the hull, as it is (nominally) the narrowest part ofthe human torso in present-day English, but the central length of the vessel (cf. thenow somewhat dated terms waistcoat and shirtwaist, clothing that covered the lengthof the torso). The first recorded use of Eng. waist in the nautical sense is from 1495.34

This suggests, but does not firmly establish, the relatively late transfer to the navalcontext of a pre-existent term with wide general application.

The equivalent French term la belle and en belle ‘abeam’ are poorly representedin both historical and contemporary French dictionaries, including some of the most

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


prestigious. Those that do contain an entry make the tacit assumption of a derivationfrom the adjective beau/bel/belle by listing la belle, en belle under this head word.We must return to Hatzfeld and Darmesteter’s Dictionnaire général de la languefrançaise of 1895–1900 to locate a separate entry, which reads as follows: ‘belle …origine inconnue … partie du pont supérieur comprise entre les haubans de misaineet ceux d’artimon’, that is, the part of the main deck between the shrouds of theforemast and those of the mizzenmast.35 Although reference points are now the masts(and not raised or otherwise discrete portions of the deck as in the current Englishdefinition), in waist and belle we are clearly dealing with the same longitudinal sectionof hull.

At this point it will be useful to cite, not least for its comparative material, theauthoritative entry from the newly revised and reissued Glossaire nautique originallycompiled by Augustin Jal:

belle, ou embelle, s.m. et f., [flam. baelie, VALK, p. 58] formes: bail(l)ie, bayle; 1. partie dupont d’en haut qui règne entre les deux gaillards, et qui ayant son bordage et son plat-bordmoins élevé que le reste de l’avant et de l’arrière, laisse cet endroit du pont presque àdécouvert par les flancs: 1515-1522 «est besoing au belle de la nef deux canons serpentins,deux grandes couleuvrines et deux bastardes», CONFLANS, P. 42; 1678 «Pendant uncombat, on met des pavois; et des gardecorps pour boucher la Belle, et c’est ordinairementpar la Belle qu’on vient à l’abordage», GUILLET; … angl. waist of the ship … néerl. hals,loopplank … all. Herz … suéd. mellandäck … dan. tværskib … norv. midtskip …36

To return to the semantics of French, none of the extended uses of beau/belleseems applicable at first glance to the nautical environment. The waist of the vesselwas never considered la belle partie nor can the expressions la belle in the sense of afavourable occasion or opportunity, or en belle ‘well off’ be adduced in this context,since a wind that came to the ship en belle ‘abeam’ would be at right angles to theaxis of the ship and to its intended path. This would require a ship under sail to tackin order to ensure some indirect advance on the desired course. Neither Latin norother and later languages of the Mediterranean littoral offer a ready etymon for bellein this usage. A cross-Channel transfer that might have brought English belly (of aship) into French is to be ruled out, as this metaphorical English expression is firstattested from 1697, and, moreover, belly was never truly part of the mariner’svocabulary.37

The early Norse lexicon of shipbuilding and sailing, from which a number ofexamples have been cited, is rich and detailed. Over 400 words and expressions havebeen catalogued, most with good identifications and corresponding evidence in thearchaeological record, although conditions for the preservation of sails and rigginghave been much poorer than those for hulls, decking and spars. Since belle is firstattested in 1694, it should not immediately be referred to a Scandinavian source nor,in this ample evidence, do we find an unequivocal antecedent for a Gallo-Romancebelle that might be thought to have entered the Norman dialect.

Nonetheless, there is a candidate that seems to stand at the same distance fromthe shipwright’s vocabulary of materials and components as do waist and belle. Thisis ON bolr, bulr which meant ‘bole’ or ‘trunk’ of a tree, by extension an animal orhuman ‘trunk’ or ‘torso’ (and ‘waistcoat’), the same image seen in English waist.38

(The old Norse masc. nom. sg. ending -r is lost in all words assumed into NormanFrench.) The word bolr is graphically if rather grimly illustrated in the Norse phrase

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


ganga milli bols och hôfuðs ‘go through between someone’s trunk and head, knockdown dead, deal severely with’. We have no example from extant ON literature ofbolr, bulr in a nautical setting, although, as Falk noted, the body, human or animal,was a ready source of nautical terminology.39 Such pervasive thieromorphism mustbe seen as more than metaphor.

There are a number of ON nautical terms on the same root as bolr, bulr, amongwhich are bálkr ‘partition, balk’, bjalki ‘beam’ and, of greater interest in the presentcontext, búlki ‘cargo’, particularly in the sense of cargo loaded into a designated areaof the ship’s hull.40

Although a less neat etymological solution than an origin in bolr, bulr, Fr. bellemay have originated in búlki ‘cargo, cargo area’, but later aligned itself phonologicallywith the common adjectival form belle, in a process not unlike a folk etymology (aswe would also have to assume for bolr, bulr).

As noted in Jal’s Glossaire nautique, some of the post-medieval source materialshows embelle as a noun meaning ‘ship’s waist’ (cf. en belle ‘abeam’).41 This variantof belle ‘waist’ suggests that the initial element en-/em- may have been associatedwith belle from an early date, and may not simply reflect the nominalization of aphrase composed of the Gallo-Romance preposition en and a loan word from Norse.The ON preposition um ‘over, across, along’ may then be considered in a putativephrasing *um bol ‘abeam’ yielding a nominal form in Gallo-Romance.42

It is generally believed that European and other Mediterranean ships withfore-and-aft lateen sails, as distinct from the square-rigged Scandinavian keels, werenot equipped and rigged to sail close to the wind and tack. Thus, vessels had littlealternative with a wind that came abeam but to turn and sail with it, or seek someother expedient to avoid being blown off course, such as lowering or furling thesail.43 It is then possible that a discrete term for ‘abeam’ did not emerge at an earlystage, but entered French only in the company of rigging, other gear such as thetacking spar (ON beitiáss, Norman betas, found in the description of Arthur’sembarkation), and sailing manoeuvres developed in the northern Europeanenvironment, which made feasible a tacking, zigzag course within about 60 degreesof the wind.

HOLYSTONEThe term for the soft sandstone used by sailors for scouring the decks of ships hasexcited considerable ingenuity, although none of the solutions proposed has muchpower of conviction: a name for stones taken from the dismantled St Nicholas Churchin Great Yarmouth; so named because sailors scrubbed the decks on their knees; orbecause of the porous, ‘holey’ nature of the stone. The OED’s earliest examples arefrom the first decades of the nineteenth century and these relatively late attestationsmake the historical depth of the term difficult to determine. The ancillary names,bibles and prayer-books, for large and smaller stones no doubt derive from holystone,not the other way around.

I suggest that we are again witnessing the effects of folk etymology and that anoriginal term has been ‘explained’ when phonological developments andstandardization of vocabulary had made the original term obscure. The Middle Englishreflexes of the verb hale in the sense of ‘haul’ are hälen, hallen, hailen, haulen, alen

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


and halie. The verb was regularly used in reference to shipboard activities and wehave medieval textual evidence for its combination with anchors, bowlines and sails.Hälen and its variants also meant ‘to move with haste or impetuosity from one place toanother’. It then seems plausible that the scouring stones were once called *halie-stonesafter the movement to which they were subjected. Admittedly, a denomination thatexpressed origin, material or purpose would seem a more likely prospect.

Since the French term for the stones is brique and the action is called briquage itappears unlikely that holystone entered early English from French, either as a directloan or in the form of a calque. But this should not dissuade us from again lookingbeyond Normandy to the Norse world. ON had a word hallr (again, the -r is notpart of the stem) for a large, slab-like stone, but while such a reduplication as‘stone-stone’ is not unheard of in English, such a term would certainly lack specificity.The Norse reflex of ME hälen was hala and it is conceivable that the use of sandstonefor polishing purposes by the Scandinavian immigrants to England who settled theDanelaw might have affected the semantic field of the English verb. Another attractivepossibility is a compound of ON háll ‘slippery’ with steinn ‘stone’ in the sense of‘stone for smoothing’.

The late attestation of holy-stoning on board suggests that the practice itself wasinstitutionalized on ships relatively late, when size, crew numbers, the use of cannonand the complexity of shipboard activities had all increased to the point where safetyand efficiency were enhanced by smooth and neat decks. If any of the abovederivations is exact, we must then imagine an early history for this term for polishingstone independent of its later use at sea. Some aspect of wood- or metal-working (cf.terms such as whetstone, pumie-stone < pumicestone) seems a likely matrix for theword’s development.

CONCLUSIONThe focus of these notes has been on word origins and semantic development in themedieval period, on the not always fully traceable movements of technologicalinnovation and social dynamics and their attendant vocabulary along the EuropeanAtlantic seaboard. The author’s selection has given pride of place to terminologyderiving from Old Norse, but this also reflects a very substantial transfer of navaltechnology to Britain and Normandy. But even after a lexical loan or calque, wordscontinue to change: becoming obsolete as the thing so designated passes from use,surviving their original referents and finding new applications, adjusting to thephonological environment of their host language. Words may be exported from onelanguage then reintroduced with new semantic shading, either to overlay the originalterm while adapting to its evolved sounds or to be assumed as a wholly new wordbut still one to be accommodated by the recipient sound system. Folk etymology,expressive of the unconscious desire for comprehensibility, may further shape andtrim the word. Although origins may be complex and layered, the resultingterminology may seem well enough at home in English or French (even though thesemantics may at times appear a bit quirky) – so much at home as to escape theattention of the historian of language.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


References

1 Robert E. Lewis (ed.-in-chief), MiddleEnglish Dictionary (University of Michigan Press,Ann Arbor, 1952), vol. L, 1143f., s.v. lödes-man.Much later, in the nineteenth century, lodesmanwould seem to have been displaced by leadsman,although the two functions are clearly distinct.

2 G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie (eds),Layamon: Brut, 2 vols, Early English Text Soci-ety, 250 (Oxford University Press, London), vv.6245f.

3 Ivor Arnold (ed.), Le Roman de Brut, 2vols, Société des Anciens Textes Français (SATF,Paris, 1940), I.vv. 3310f.

4 Paul Barbier, in ‘On the origin and his-tory of three French words’, Studies in Frenchlanguage and literature … R. L. Graeme Ritchie(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1949,repr. Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, NY,1966), 9–23, offers the only full treatment of ‘OldFrench laman “pilot, sea-pilot, coastal- orharbour-pilot” ’ (12-22), but his proposed devel-opment and interrelation of the various forms inEnglish, French and other languages is not con-vincing in its detail. The present note is concernedmore with semantic than phonological evolution.

5 Paul Studer (ed. and trans.), The OakBook of Southampton, of C.A.D., 1300, 3 vols(Cox and Sharland, Southampton, 1910), II.76–9. The passages on customary maritime law in thiswork and those listed below all appear to go backto the Rôles d’Oléron, which may have twelfth-century origins and have been to a great extentprompted by the extensive wine trade betweenBordeaux and England. See Karl FriederichKrieger, Ursprung und Wurzeln der Rôlesd’Oléron (Böhlau, Köln, 1970); James Shephard,Les origines des Rôles d’Oléron, MA thesis(Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, 1983); GeorgesPeyronnet, ‘Un document capital dans l’histoiredu droit maritime: les rôles d’Oléron, XII–XVIIsiècles’, Sources [Paris] 8 (1986), 3–10. Grands andpetits lamans are distinguished: the former weresea-pilots, the latter guided shipping along thecoast, into estuaries and ports. In a text comple-mentary to the Rôles d’Oléron, Le coutumierd’Oléron, the island’s collection of customary law,editor and translator James H. Williston identi-fies the grand laman as the capitain, although thisis unsupported in the evidence (Société des

antiquaires de l’Ouest, Poitiers, 1992), 168, 176.Other texts, none in a trustworthy modern edi-tion, and their approximate dates are: Francis B.Bickley (ed.), The Little Red Book of Bristol (W.C.Hemmons, Bristol, 1900) [c. 1350]; J. GaronwyEdwards (ed.), Littere Wallie preserved in LiberA in the Public Record Office (University PressBoard, Cardiff, 1940) [1283]; Travis Twiss (ed. andtrans.), The Black Book of the Admiralty, 4 vols,Rolls Series (Longman, Trübner, London, 1871–6) [c. 1450]. A similarly dated overview is foundin the better-known work by J.-M. Pardessus,Collection de lois maritimes antérieures au XVIIIesiècle, 6 vols (Imprimerie royale, Paris, 1826–45),I.332f. Pardessus is particularly misleading as con-cerns the passage quoted here from The OakBook, because he states that coastal pilots are takenaboard in order to pass the various named land-marks, whereas these rather mark the boundariesof the pilots’ ‘jurisdictions’.

6 Translation adapted from Studer.7 Twiss, Black Book of the Admiralty,

II.394.8 The ‘General Prologue’ of The Canter-

bury Tales, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), TheRiverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Houghton Mifflin,Boston, 1987), 30, vv. 401–4. The portrait men-tions another span of coast reminiscent of the wayof dividing pilots’ areas of competence, ‘FroGootland to the cape of Fynystere’, the Baltic is-land of Gotland to Cape Finistere on the Iberianpeninsula. We should not forget that Chaucer’swork in customs, and his portrait of the Shipman,in particular as concerns barratry and piracy, mayowe something to such collections of customarylaw as the Rôles d’Oléron and the CatalanConsulat de Mar; see William Sayers, ‘Chaucer’sShipman and the Law Marine’, The Chaucer Re-view (in press).

9 See R. E. Latham (ed.), Dictionary ofMedieval Latin from British Sources (OxfordUniversity Press, London, 1975), fasc. 5, 1635.Additional early instances (lodmannagium,lodesmannus, 1282) are also listed in this source.

10 We may question whether the 400:40 ra-tio of lexical loans from Norse to Norman repre-sents continuity or its opposite. But much ofGallo-Romance nautical vocabulary would haveserved well to describe construction of and activ-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


ity on a Scandinavian-style ship, and it may wellbe that the surviving lexical loans represent andaccompanied the transfer of a new nautical tech-nology from Scandinavia to Francia.

11 J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller (eds), AnAnglo-Saxon Dictionary, repr. (Oxford Univer-sity Press, Oxford, 1976), s.v. lädman; see, too,the Old English Corpus assembled for the Dic-tionary of Old English, which has a single instance,referenced Num. B8, 1.4.4 (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/o/oed).

12 Walter van Wartburg (ed.), Französischesetymologisches Wörterbuch [FEW], 20 vols(Klopf, Bonn, 1928–68, since 1992 Zbinden,Basel), Germanische elemente, 16 (1959), 480, s.v.lootsman. The Nouveau glossaire nautiqued’Augustin Jal. Revision de l’édition publiée en1848 (CNRS, Paris, and Mouton, La Haye, 1970),fasc. L (1998), 1032f., has a valuable collection ofexamples of lamaneur and lamanage but acceptsthe lootsman derivation and so incorporates ex-amples of its early attestation and supposed de-rivatives. It should also be noted that the firstexamples of loman cited in Frédéric Godefroy,Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française(Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, Paris, 1881–1902), are rather later than those cited here fromEnglish naval records.

13 Francesco Balduccio Pegolotti, La praticadella mercatura, Allan Evans (ed.) (The Mediae-val Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass.,1936), 16 and 257.

14 Hue de Rotelande, Protheselaus, A. J.Holden (ed.), 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Soci-ety 47 (Anglo-Norman Text Society, London,1991–3), I. vv. 1409–24. The editor’s notes to vv.1411–2 and 1421 make a number of usefulcorrectives to earlier commentary but, as mytranslation and the subsequent discussion of topindicate, the nautical scene has not been fullyunderstood nor the Norse origin of top recog-nized.

15 I interpret lof, in this twelfth-century ref-erence, as a wooden pin through the sheerstraketo extend the weather edge of the sail, thus func-tioning like a bumpkin. Later it would come tomean the forward edge of the square sail itself,and then generally the windward quarter when aship was tacking. A Germanic etymology hasbeen generally been sought for luff. I contend thatthe origin of the term, perhaps like the operation

of tacking itself, is to be sought in the Scandinaviannorth. See William Sayers, ‘A Norse Etymologyfor luff “weather edge of the sail” ’, The Ameri-can Neptune, 61 (2002), 25–38.

16 Jean-Luc Leclanche (ed.), Le conte deFloire et Blancheflor, Classiques Français duMoyen Age (Honoré Champion, Paris, 1980), vv.1379–86.

17 Margaret Pelan (ed.), Floire et Blancheflor(Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1937),vv. 1195f. In connection with the variation be-tween tores and tups, we may note that Sandahlsuggests that ME top is a shortened form oftopcastle. He cites Old French (better, Norman)top but offers only a non-specific Germanic ori-gin. The end result is the impression that top nevermeant ‘mast top’ in Norman, but this is clearlywrong as top castles were not in use, for example,in Hue of Rotelande’s time. Sandahl’s sequencemust be reversed, with an early top ‘mast top’being given broader semantics to include thestructures mounted around the mast top, the cas-tles.

In some instances there is doubt as to whethertref is being used in its narrow sense of ‘yard’ asderived from Lat trabs, trabis ‘beam’ or more gen-erally as ‘yard with sail attached’, even ‘sail’ alone.In this last case it would show the influence of aGermanic, likely Frankish, term for ‘tent’ thatoriginally referenced textile material and was thenextended to the wool (and occasionally linen) ofsails. In general, when the description or narra-tive is at its technically most detailed, the mean-ing ‘yard’ prevails, as in the present passage.

18 Geoffroy Gaimar, L’estoire des Engleis,Alexander Bell (ed.), Anglo-Norman Text Soci-ety, 14–16 (B. Blackwell, Oxford, 1960), vv. 6080ff.

19 C. R. Unger (ed.), Mariusögur, 2 vols(Bragger & Christie, Christiania, 1871), 786.

20 Snorri Sturluson, Edda Snorra Sturluson-ar: nafnaþular og skáldatal, Guðni Jónsson (ed.),(Íslendingasagaútgáfan, Reykjavík, 1949), 330–3,at 331. For a full discussion, see William Sayers,‘The Ship heiti in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál’, ScriptaIslandica, 49 (1998), 45–86.

21 G. V. Smithen (ed.), The Life of Alexan-der: Kyng Alisaunder, Early English Text Society,22 (Oxford University Press, London, 1952),1.1415.

22 F. J. Mather Jr. (ed.), ‘King Ponthus andthe Fair Sidone’, PMLA, 12 (1897), 1–150, at 6,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


1.19. It is of interest to note reflexes of Old Norsenautical terms being called up when continentalromances, especially French, were translated inScandinavia. As an example, a brief passage froma medieval Swedish translation, Flores ochBlanzeflor:

Tha til skipith komin var han,han badh sik kallæ then styre man;‘Thu skal thet gøra iak bidher hæræ,Styr til the hampn that veet næst Væra!’(When he reached the ship, he had thesteersman summoned.‘Do as I now command; steer for the har-bour you know to be nearest!’)

Emil Olson (ed.), Flores och Blanzefor (C. Blomsboktr., Lund, 1956), vv. 661–4. Here we findSwedish equivalents of the Norse terms that gaveNorman French words we have earlier seen forskip, steersman, and harbour.

23 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 20vols (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989).

24 James A. H. Murray (ed.), The complayntof Scotland, Early English Text Society, 18 (N.Trübner, London, 1872), 42.

25 See Hjalmar Falk, ‘Altnordisches Seewes-en’, Wörter und Sachen, 4 (1912), 1–122, at 60.

26 Bertil Sandahl, Middle English Sea Terms,3 vols (Lundequistska Bokhandeln, Uppsala, andHarvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1951–82), III.102ff.

27 The normal meaning of étui in French is‘sheath, case’ and the word has been traced viaOFr. estuier ‘keep, conserve’ to Late Lat. *studiareand eventually to studium ‘application, zeal, care’.The term for the sail, bonnette en étui, is then quiteunlikely to derive from this source and we mustrather imagine the evolving Old French estuincaligning itself with the better-known word, de-spite the semantic anomaly. Perhaps the sail’s pro-portions might have permitted it to be conceivedof as ‘sheath-shaped’.

28 Niels Lund (ed.), Two voyagers at thecourt of King Alfred: the ventures of Ohthere andWulfstan, together with the description of north-ern Europe from the Old English Orosius (Ses-sions, York, 1984), 20. Ohthere’s tributaries paidhim two ship’s ropes (annually?), one of walrusand one of seal, each 60 ells long. If we take boththe English and Scandinavian ell to be 18 inches,the ropes would have been a fairly impressive 90feet long (unless sciprap is being used as a collec-

tive and several lengths of rope were allowed).29 Guillaume de Berneville, La Vie de Saint

Gile, Gaston Paris and A. Bos (eds), Société desAnciens Textes Français (Firmin Didot, Paris,1881), vv. 876–906.

30 Full treatment in William Sayers, ‘NorseNautical Terminology in Twelfth-CenturyAnglo-Norman Verse’, Romanische Forschungen,109 (1997), 383–426.

31 Sandahl, III.123, s.v. uptie.32 Útstag is still advanced in Jean Renaud,

‘L’héritage maritime norrois en Normandie’, inCatherine Bougy et al (eds), Mélanges RenéLepelley: recueil d’études en hommage auProfesseur René Lepelley (Musée de Normandie,Caen, 1995), 21–7, at 26. The article offers a use-ful, if somewhat uncritical, set of Norman termsfrom ON.

33 On differences between Old Danish andthe better-known, standardized Old Norse- Ice-landic, and on their implications for NormanFrench, see Ralph Paul de Gorog, The Scandinav-ian Element in French and Norman: a study ofthe influence of the Scandinavian languages onFrench from the tenth century to the present(Bookman Associates, New York, 1958).

34 ‘Stone gonnes of yron in the Wast of theseid Shipp’, Naval accounts and inventories of thereign of Henry VII, 1485–97 (Naval Records So-ciety, London, 1896), 194, re-edited in Sandahl,I.207, and dated to 1485; ‘These goodly shyppeslay there at rode … The wastes decked withserpentynes stronge’, Here after followeth yebatayll of Egyngecourte … (Johan Skot, London,[1536?]), 90 Aij. See too Middle English Diction-ary, s.v. wast(e).

35 Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmest-eter, Dictionnaire général de la langue française(Ch. Delagrave, Paris, 1895–1900).

36 Nouveau glossaire nautique, fasc. B(1972), s.v. belle.

37 OED, belly 9, II.789, col. b.38 Although the first European vessels were

logboats fashioned from a single trunk, no ante-cedent at this historical depth (proto-Germanic?)is claimed here for bolr, bulr in the sense of ship’swaist.

39 Falk, ‘Altnordisches Seewesen’, 52. In theexamples which follow, the basic corporeal mean-ing is followed by the figurative nautical use: bógr‘shoulder; bow’, hals ‘neck; hawse’, hlýr ‘cheek’

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4


(near the ear); bow’, kinn ‘cheek; bow’ (cf. Fr. joue‘cheek; bow’), kinnungr ‘bow’, lær ‘thigh, shank;stern’ (cf. Fr. hanche ‘haunch; quarter’ (of a ship).

40 A descriptive passage from the saga ofthe contentious thirteenth-century bishopGuðmundr Arason (Prestsaga Guðmundar góða),part of the compilation known as Sturlunga saga,will illustrate how closely the cargo area and theship’s waist might be associated:

On Saturday evening, as they were sitting atsupper, a man called Asmund, a Norwegian,threw open a corner of the ship’s tent andcried: ‘Hey! hey! Get the awnings off! Getup, men, and be quick about it! Breakersahead! Shove aside the tables and never mindyour supper!’ They all sprang up and threwoff the awnings. … Just as they had raisedthe sail less than six feet from the cargo [afbúlka], a heavy sea dashed against the cargo,fore and aft, and broke over it. There wassomeone clinging to every rope. Ingimundseized a sail-hook and tried to bring downthe sail, while his nephew Gudmund hadtaken his place by the ship’s boat [stored ontop of the cargo], and he too tried to bringdown the sail and gather it as he stood be-tween it and the boat. But just at that mo-ment there came another heavy sea, so greatthat it went over the whole ship. It sweptaway the vane of the mast and both theweather-boards [on the gunwales], and over-board went the sail and every piece of thecargo that was not fastened down, except themen. The ship was much damaged and so wasthe boat. They had got clear of the breakerswhen a third sea struck them, and this wasnot as heavy as the others. Now the menrushed to bail out the ship, both fore and aft,and the sail was hoisted. Then they saw landand began discussing where they were.

Translation adapted from G. Turville-Petre andE. S. Olszewska (trans.), Guðmundar sagaArasonar: The Life of Gudmund the Good (Vi-king Society for Northern Research, London,1982), 10f. Icelandic original in Guðni Jonsson(ed.), Guðmundar saga Arasonar (Íslendingasag-aútgáfan, Haukadalsútgáfan, Reykjavík, 1953),189f.

41 ‘1667 «Embelle est le lieu le plus bas etdécouvert du vaisseau au droit du maistre couple

et du grant mast, et le lieu où est l’abaissement dela tonture», FOURNIER, Hydr.’, Nouveau glossairenautique, fasc. D–E (1983), 526, s.v. embelle.

42 As concerns prepositions and related ad-verbs, better evidence is available for ON þverr‘athwart, transverse’ in nautical contexts, e.g. beitaþvert ‘beat to windward or tack’, þverskeytingr‘cross wind’, and, most relevant, þverskipa‘athwart the ship’. But in this last instance, whilemovement transversal to the ship’s axis is indi-cated, it is within the physical limits of the ship,from one side of the hull or deck to the other. Inthe notion of ‘abeam’, on the other hand, trans-versal movement is toward the ship which can beseen as its terminus. Furthermore, we have noexample of þverr or the adverbial form þvers be-ing used of a sea or wind that strikes the ship fromthe side.

43 This consideration of wind and sea com-ing abeam raises the topic of broaching to, de-fined by the OED as ‘to veer suddenly so as toturn the side [of the ship] to windward, or to meetthe sea’. The verb could also be used transitivelywith the sense of causing the ship so to turn. Theearliest written attestations are from the first dec-ade of the eighteenth century, which speaksagainst, but does not preclude, an origin in thecomplex interplay of Old and Middle English,Old Danish and Norman French of the MiddleAges. French brocher in the sense of ‘skewer’ hasbeen proposed, but the image here would have tobe that of the ship spitted on the direction of thrustof the wind and waves, which does not sit toowell with the active, as opposed to passive, voiceof the verb or the adverb ‘to’. While the questionwill not be pursued in the present context, I amattracted to the notion of a derivation from OldNorse brjóta, basically ‘to break’ (also used im-personally and with a reflexive form, brjótask),which occurs in a good number of nautical idi-oms, e.g. brjóta skip ‘to be shipwrecked’. But noneof these is directly suggestive of broaching to andagain we should have to have recourse to imagery,the true course of the ship ‘broken’ as it is turnedsideways, to account for the expression.

William Sayers writes on medieval westernEuropean languages and literatures and concur-rently works in collection development at theCornell University Library, New York.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an P

ublic

Uni

vers

ity S

yste

m]

at 1

2:08

19

Febr

uary

201

4

Documents

SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES