A white picket fence, made of pales and decorated with holiday ribbons, casts shadows across a road in Brunswick, Maine. A white clapboard house and woods are in the background.
18 January 2022
Something that is beyond the pale is inappropriate or outside the bounds of what is considered to be acceptable. The phrase is well understood, but many, if not most, do not recognize what a pale is in this context.
The literal meaning of pale in the phrase is a stake, a sharpened piece of wood that is driven into the ground to form part of a barrier or fence. The word is borrowed from both the Latin palus and the Anglo-Norman pal, both meaning stake. The Anglo-Norman is, of course, ultimately from the Latin. The English word pole is also from the Latin palus but has had a different semantic development over the centuries.
The word makes a single appearance in the Old English Corpus in a c.1000 glossary by Ælfric of Eyesham which glosses the Latin palus with the Old English pal. But the word really gains traction in English in the fourteenth century after the influence of Anglo-Norman has made itself felt. It appears in a Wycliffite Bible from before 1382 in a translation of Ecclesiasticus 14.24–25 from the Latin Vulgate. From the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian 959:
Who byholdeth bi the wyndowes of it, and in the ȝatis of it is herende; who restith biside the hous of it, and in the walles of it pitcheth a pale. He shal ordeyne his litle hous at the hondis of it goodis, bi aungelis during.
(Who peers through its windows and listens at its gates, who camps near its house and fastens a pale to the walls, he shall set his tent nearby, angels shall bring good things to it forever.)
Other manuscripts of this translation have picching a pole. The Vulgate reads figens palum.
But in English, pale could also mean a fence made of pales. We see this sense in the same biblical translation, only this time in Luke 19:43 and the manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 359:
But daies schulen come in thee, and thin enemyes schulen enuyroun thee with a pale, and thei shulen go streyt on alle sydis.
(For days shall come to you, and your enemies will surround you with a pale, and they shall besiege you on all sides.)
By the middle of the next century, pale had developed a figurative meaning of a region or territory, one actually or figuratively enclosed by a fence or boundary. This sense of the word can be applied generally, but it has often been deployed in three specific senses. There was the English Pale of Calais, the area of coastal France around that city that was controlled by the English from 1347–1558. There was the English Pale in Ireland, the region around Dublin controlled by the English from the twelfth until the sixteenth centuries, when the rest of Ireland was conquered by the English. And there was the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia where Jews were allowed to live (1791–1917).
Use of pale to refer to such a territory dates to c.1453 when it appears in a version of the prose Brut, a chronicle of English history that mixed legend and fact. The reference here is to the English Pale of Calais:
And Sir Iohn Radcliff, Leotenaunt, warnet and charget al þe cuntre þat was of þe Englisshe pale, [þat þey] shuld come and bring a[l] thaire goodes, and breke doun theire houses; and so, many of hem did, and of hem stale away, some into Picardy and some into Flandres.
But it wasn’t long before pale came to represent a figurative boundary. A translation of Jacobus da Voragine’s Legenda aurea sanctorum (Golden Legends of the Saints), published by William Caxton in 1483, uses pale to refer to the bounds of what is allowed in a monastic order. In 1098 Robert of Molesme in Burgandy left his monastery to found a new one at Cîteaux, which would lead to the founding of the Cistercian order. The text reads:
And whan he came to hym self he sayd / goo ye and synge the newe hystorye of saynt nycholas from hens forth / In that same tyme the abbotte of the couente of molesyne and xxj monkes wyth hym went for to dwelle in deserte / for to kepe more straytelye the professyon of theyr pale / and there establysshed a newe ordre out of the ordre.
(And when he came to himself he said, go and sing the new history of Saint Nicholas from henceforth. At the same time, the abbot of the monastery of Molesme and with him 21 monks went to dwell in the desert in order to keep more strictly the profession of their pale, and there established a new order out of the order.)
Finally, we see the phrase beyond the pale by the early seventeenth century. Here is an example from a 1612 commentary on Paul’s letter to Titus. The commentary connects Paul’s admonition in Titus 2:3 that women should not gossip and slander with his commanding women be silent in church from 1 Corinthians 14:33. This example is a particularly nice one in that it makes the metaphor explicit with its mention of a hedge as a boundary:
And thus the Apostle by this precept backeth the former, the due obseruance of which would cut off much false accusing in such meetings; and in the neglect of it, it is impossible but that the tongue will be walking without his owne hedge, and wandring beyond the pale of it.
And the phrase beyond the pale comes into wider use in the eighteenth century. There is this example from 1713 that compares the Church of England and its break with Rome with Paul’s missions to the Gentiles that were beyond the pale of the early church in Jerusalem:
The like Fury they shewed when St. Paul told them the Gospel was to be Extended beyond the Pale of their Church, and that God had sent him to the Gentiles.
And there is this from a 1720 book that has the click-baity title of The Compleat History of the Lives, Robberies, Piracies, and Murders Committed by the Most Notorious Rogues that describes Acteon’s watching the goddess Diana bathe as beyond the Pale of Expedience:
These Follies are prettily shadowed in the Sports of Acteon, who while he suffer’d his Eye to rove at Pleasure, and beyond the Pale of Expedience, his Hounds, even his own Affections, seiz’d him, tore him, and prov’d his utter Destruction.
Some posit claims that the phrase beyond the pale has its roots in one of the historical pales, usually either the one in Ireland or the one in Russia. But as the above examples show, the metaphor arose out the general sense of pale meaning a territory or region, and not any specific example of one.
Sources:
Ælfric. Grammatik and Glossar. Julius Zupitza, ed. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880, 318. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. pal1. https://anglo-norman.net/
Brie, Friedrich W.D., ed. The Brut, or The Chronicles of England, vol. 2 of 2. Early English Text Society OS 136. London: Kegan Paul, et al. 1908, 574. London, British Library, Harley 53. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
da Voragine, Jacobus. Legenda aurea sanctorum (Golden Legends of the Saints). London: William Caxton, 1483, fol. 415r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, 2009.
Forshall, Josiah and Frederic Madden, eds. The Holy Bible, vol. 3 of 4. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850, Ecclesiasticus 14.24–25, 150. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian 959. And vol. 4 of 4. Luke 19:43, 212–13. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 359. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Leslie, Charles. The Case Stated Between the Church of Rome and the Church of England. London: G. Strahan, 1713, 41. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. pal(e, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, modified December 2021, s.v. pale, n.1, English Pale, n.
Smith, Alexander. The Third Volume of the Compleat History of the Lives, Robberies, Piracies, and Murders Committed by the Most Notorious Rogues. London: Samuel Briscoe, 1720, sig. a*3r. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Taylor, Thomas. A Commentarie Vpon the Epistle of S. Paul Written to Titus. Cambridge: Cantrell Legge for L. Greene, 1612, 370. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: Paul VanDerWerf, 2015. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.