27 June 2020
A henchman, as the word is generally used today, is a criminal lackey, a thug who assists a crime boss. It can be used to mean a lackey in a non-criminal enterprise, but it still carries the connotation of one who is up to no good. But what is a hench?
Henchman is an old word, with roots that go back to Old English. It is a compound of hengest + man. The first part of the compound, hengest, means a male horse, a stallion or gelding. It has cognates in many Germanic languages, including present-day German where hengst means stallion. In early medieval England, it was also a personal name—Hengist and Horsa, the mythical leaders of the Germanic settlers c. 450 in what would become England were supposedly two brothers, both named “horse.” An example of hengest in Old English is from the will of Wulfric, c. 1003, a nobleman who endowed Burton Abbey, in what is now Burton upon Trent:
into þam mynstre æt Byrtune . an hun ƿildra horse . & sextena tame hencgestas . & þærto eall þæt ic hæbbe on libbendan . & on licgendan . butan þan ðe becƿeden hæbbe
(To the monastery at Burton, one hundred wild horses and sixteen tame geldings and besides this all that I have in livestock and goods, except that which I have bequeathed.)
Hengest here could mean either stallion or gelding. It’s not clear which, but the will clearly distinguishes the sixteen male horses from the one hundred other horses, which could be of either sex.
While the roots of henchman are Old English, the compound *hengestmann does not appear in any extant Old English texts, but it may have existed then, with the meaning of a servant who cared for the horses, a groom, literally “horse-man.” We know henchman is older than its first appearance in English because, oddly for a word with English roots, the compound first appears in Anglo-Latin, i.e., Latin texts written in England, and Anglo-Norman, i.e., the dialect of French spoken by the Norman aristocracy after 1066.
The oldest known example is in Anglo-Latin from 1345–49, in the Wardrobe Accounts of Edward III:
Johanni Fige, Ricardo de Yatesley, & Ricardo Merser, Hengsmannis Regis.
(John Fig, Richard of Yateley, and Richard Mercer, Masters of the King’s Horse.)
We start to see the shift in the form and meaning in another Anglo-Latin text, the Accounts of the Exchequer of the King’s Rembrancer from 1377–80. We start to see the shortening of hengest to hench, but also the meaning generalizes to refer to a servant or attendant more generally, not just a groom:
Hans Wynsele, henxstman domini regis pro vestura et apparat' suis.
(Hans Wynsele, henchman, master of the king’s clothing and his equipment.
We also find it in an Anglo-Norman text from c. 1370:
en quelle chace estoient prises certeine del armure du dit O[weyn], certeins chivalx et lances, [...] et son henxman, lequele je intende envoier a nostre seignur le Roy vostre pere
(in that encounter were taken some of the armor of the said Owen, some horses and spears, [...] and his henchman, who I intend to send to our lord, the king, your father)
An early appearance in English, in the form hanseman, can be found in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, a poetic version of the Arthur legend found in Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91. It was composed sometime before 1400, and the manuscript dates to c. 1440. Lines 2660–67:
Bot ȝif thow hye fro þis hethe, it harmes vs bothe,
And bot my hurtes be son holpen, hole be I neuer.
Take heede to þis hanseman þat he no horne blawe,
Are thowe heyly in haste beese hewen al to peces;
For they are my retenuz, to ryde whare I wyll,
Es non redyare renkes regnande in erthe;
Be thow raghte with þat rowtt, thow rydes no forþer,
Ne thow bees neuer rawnsonede for reches in erthe.
(But if you hasten from this heath, it harms us both,
And although my hurts will soon heal, I will never be whole.
Take heed that this henchman does not blow a horn,
Are you in such haste to be hewn all to pieces;
For they are my retinue to ride where I will,
It is not the straighter courses that prevail on earth;
If you take up with that company, you ride no further,
Nor will you ever be ransomed for earthly riches.)
Henchman would continue to be used over the succeeding centuries to refer to a high-ranking servant or assistant to a nobleman. But in the early nineteenth century it begins to be used for any assistant or loyal follower. Byron uses this sense in his 1823 Don Juan, but given the source and author, it is almost certainly meant to be read ironically, in that Juan is no nobleman. From canto 11.13, lines 97–104:
Juan yet quickly understood their gesture,
And being somewhat choleric and sudden,
Drew forth a pocket pistol from his vesture,
And fired it into one assailant's pudding,
Who fell, as rolls an ox o'er in his pasture,
And roar'd out, as he writhed his native mud in,
Unto his nearest follower or henchman,
“Oh Jack! I 'm floor'd by that ere bloody Frenchman!”
The full shift to criminality, and what is today the dominant sense of the word, happens about seventy-five years later in the United States. We have this description of New York City gang leader Paul Kelly that uses henchman on 9 December 1905:
He is slim, about thirty-five years old, dark, and has a sallow face, that on Fifth avenue might belong' to a clergyman, on the Bowery to a third-rate actor, but on Great Jones street is that of the leader of the largest and worst gang in the city. Strangely enough, Paul Kelly has no police record—he always delegates his duties to a henchman.
There we have it. A word with Old English roots that once referred to a high-ranking groom or servant of the king which in the American context became the lacky of crime-lord.
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