squire / esquire

30 November 2020

The words squire and esquire come into English from the Anglo-Norman esquier, which in turn comes from the Latin scutarius, or shield bearer, from scutum, shield.

Squire appears in English by the early thirteenth century in the sense of a boy or young man who attends a knight or nobleman. Such squires were often in training to be knights themselves. From the romance King Horn, composed c. 1225. It survives in several manuscripts, and the following is taken from one that was copied c. 1300:

“Go nu,” quaþ heo, “sone
& send him after none,

Whane þe kyng arise,
On a squieres wise,
To wude for to pleie:
Nis non þat him biwreie.”

(“Go now,” said she, “soon
& send him after noon,

Dressed as a squire,
When the king arises,
to the woods for sport,
No one will betray him.)

Squire appears as verb meaning to escort a person, especially to escort a woman, by the late fourteenth century. From Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, written c. 1386:

And yet of oure apprentice Janekyn,
For his crispe heer, shynynge as gold so fyn,
And for he squiereth me bothe up and doun,
Yet hastow caught a fals suspecioun.

(And yet of our apprentice Janekyn,
Because of his curly hair, shining as gold so fine,
And because he squires me both up and down,
Yet has caught a false suspicion.)

The verb isn’t recorded again until the late sixteenth century, but it was probably in use much earlier.

The form esquire is a somewhat later borrowing from the Anglo-Norman. A 1374 Latin document makes a reference to “Willielmus Gray, esquier.” And the following appears in a document written in English found in the Proceedings of the Privy Council of England from 1419:

ther wer sende us with our prive seal viij. oþ[er] blanche not endosyd but þat we shulde endoce hem to suche knyghtis and esquiers as us thoght able þe whcihe prive seals we have endosid and sent forþ to dyv[er]s p[er]sones gyvyng hem a day when þat they shulde come and trete with us

(There were sent to us with our personal seal eight others that were blank and not endorsed, so that we should endorse them to such knights and esquires as we thought able, which personal seals we have endorsed and sent forth to diverse persons giving them a day when they should come and treat with us)

Over time, esquire generalized in meaning to refer to any gentleman, not necessarily a servant of a knight.

In American speech, esquire is rarely used, with one major exception—lawyers, who often append the title to their name. There is no legal significance to the title, and anyone is allowed to style themselves as esquire, as in Bill S. Preston, Esq. Although non-lawyers almost never do. (Which is why the Bill S. Preston, Esq. joke is funny.)

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2015, s.v. esquier.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. In the Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 3.303–06, 109.

Hall, Joseph, ed. King Horn: A Middle-English Romance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901, lines 359–62, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Cambridge, University Library Gg.4.27, Part 2).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. squier, n., squieren, v., esquier, n.

Nicolas, Harris, ed. Proceedings of the Privy Council of England, vol. 2 of 6. London: Commissioners on the Public Records, 1834, 247. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. esquire, n.1, squire, n., squire, v.

“De protectionibus, pro personis qui cum Edmundo comite Cantebrigiæ, profecturi sunt.” (1374). Foedera, conventiones, litterae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, vol 3, part 2, of 3 vols. Thomas Rymer, ed. London: 1830, 1012. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

indigenous

Chiricahua Apache children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. March 1887, an example of forced assimilation into settler-colonist culture

25 November 2020

The word indigenous, at least as it is used to refer to people, has been undergoing a subtle shift in meaning in the last half century or so, a shift that the major dictionaries have not yet caught up with. The word is from the Late Latin indigenus, meaning native to, born in. In its earliest English uses, the word was used as in the Latin. And when referring to plants, animals, and geology, indigenous still means precisely that, native to the region in question.

The earliest English-language use of the word that I’m aware of actually refers to people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Michael Stanhope’s 1632 Cures Without Care is a book about the mineral waters near Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and it uses the phrase indigenous poor people to refer to those born into poverty:

Those who neighbour nearest to these waters, are an indigenous poore people, not able to step out of the roade of their laborious calling, being plaine husbandmen and cottagers, and therefore it cannot be expected they should accommodate them in their many usefull concernments wherein they are most grossely defective.

And a decade or so later, indigenous is used in the context of colonialism. From Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia epidemica:

In many parts thereof it be confessed there bee at present swarmes of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus, and are not indigenous or proper natives of America.

But it was not exclusively used in the context of colonialism. As late as 1782, Europeans could be referred to as indigenous. From a tract by Samuel Musgrave of that year:

Upon the whole, therefore, we have best reason to conclude, first, that the Greeks in general were an indigenous people, αὐτόχθουες: and, secondly, that their RELIGION and MYTHOLOGY was radically, if not entirely, their own.

The Greek autochthonous is synonymous with indigenous in meaning native to a region, although in current English-language use autochthonous is not generally used to refer to people.

But indigeneity was increasingly tied to race and decreasingly associated with European peoples. In 1790, Bruce James writes of the people of East Africa:

The Ethiopians, who nearly surround Abyssinia are blacker than those of Gingiro, their country hotter, and are like them, an indigenous people that have been, from the beginning, in the same part where they now inhabit.

And by the middle of the twentieth century, indigenous was inextricably contrasted to White settler colonists. For instance, in their 1962 White Settlers in Tropical Africa Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan write of Victorian attitudes to toward Africans, distinguishing the indigenous Blacks from the settler-colonist Whites. Duigan uses indigenous Africans to distinguish from White African settler-colonists in Africa, some of whose families had lived in Africa for centuries:

The indigenous Africans, Europe’s “external proletariat,” were looked upon as being even more licentious and improvident than her “internal proletariat,” the unskilled workers of Manchester, Lille, and Essen; for most Victorians, this was saying a great deal.

And writing in French about the same time in his 1961 Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), Frantz Fanon contrasts indigènes with européennes:

Le monde colonial est un monde compartimenté. Sans doute est-il superflu, sur le plan de la description, de rappeler l'existence de villes indigènes et de villes européennes, d'écoles pour indigènes et d'écoles pour Européens, comme il est superflu de rappeler l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud.

But starting in the 1970s, Indigenous peoples began to organize on a global scale and resisted these earlier senses of indigenous as applied to people that were imposed by a framework established by settler colonists. As an example, a 2004 translation of Fanon’s book into English by Richard Philcox does not use indigenous to translate indigènes, instead using native in quotation marks:

The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of "native" towns and European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa.

Clearly, something had shifted between 1961 and 2004 and indigenous, at least in North American English, no longer simply meant native to a region. Indigeneity no longer was a simple contrast of race or ethnicity. In 2016 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, a professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, writes:

On the flip side, in asserting indigeneity as a category of analysis, the question of its substance always arises. Just as critical race studies scholars insist that race is a useful category that is a distinct social formation rather than a derivative category emerging from class and/or ethnicity, indigeneity is a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and nationality—even as it entails elements of all three of these.

The First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia gives the following definition of indigenous:

The United Nations generally identifies Indigenous groups as autonomous and self-sustaining societies that have faced discrimination, marginalization and assimilation of their cultures and peoples due to the arrival of a larger or more dominant settler population. The word Indigenous was adopted by Aboriginal leaders in the 1970s after the emergence of Indigenous rights movements around the world as a way to identify and unite their communities and represent them in political arenas such as the United Nations. Indigenous was chosen over other terms that leaders felt reflected particular histories and power dynamics, or had been imposed by the colonizers. Given the diversity of Indigenous experience, no universally accepted definition has been drafted.

Indigeneity, because it arises out of a contrast with settler colonists, cannot be separated from the contexts of oppression, marginalization, and forced assimilation in which it has always existed. When it is applied to people, therefore, it means much more than simply native to a region.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia epidemica. London: T.H. for E. Dod, 1646, 325. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Bruce, James. An Interesting Narrative of the Travels of James Bruce, Esq. into Abyssinia. Samuel Shaw, ed. London: 1790, 107. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre (1961). Paris: La Découvete, 2002, 41.

———. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Richard Philcox, trans. New York: Grove Press, 2004, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gann, Lewis H. and Peter Duignan. White Settlers in Tropical Africa. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962, 9. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “‘A Structure, Not an Event.’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral, 5.1, Spring 2016.

Musgrave, Samuel. Two Dissertations. London: J. Nichols, 1782, 17. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. indigenous, adj.; third edition, June 2011, s.v. autochthonous, adj.

Stanhope, Michael. Cures Without Care. London: William Jones, 1632, 26. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

University of British Columbia, First Nations Studies Program. “Global Actions.”

Photo credit: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, public domain image.

pilgrim

Image of Geoffrey Chaucer on a horse pointing to the start of the “Tale of Melibee” in the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, a tale that one of the ones told by the character of Chaucer, the pilgrim, in that work

24 November 2020

Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

(It happened that in that season one day,
In Southwark at the Tabard Inn as I lay
Ready to go on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with a very devout spirit,
At night had come into that hostelry
Fully nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry people, by chance fallen
Into a fellowship, and they were all pilgrims
Who intended to ride to Canterbury.)

—Geoffrey Chaucer, “The General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, lines 19–27

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1 minute and 30 seconds of John Wayne calling Jimmy Stewart pilgrim in the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Whoa, take ‘er easy there, pilgrim.

—John Wayne, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

To most Americans nowadays, the word pilgrim conjures up one of three images: the puritans who arrived in what is now Massachusetts in 1620; a person on a religious journey; or John Wayne schooling some cowboy wannabe.

Pilgrim comes to us from the Latin peregrinus, via the Anglo-Norman pelerin or pilegrin. The original Latin meaning was that of a foreigner, stranger, exile, or traveler, that is someone who wasn’t from these parts. That meaning still survives today and is what John Wayne meant when he kept calling Jimmy Stewart’s character pilgrim in John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the film, Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer from the East, and Wayne’s character of Tom Doniphon treats him with affectionate disdain for his inexperience in the ways of the Wild West.

But pilgrim is much older than the American West. It dates to the late Old English period when it is found in a list of witnesses to a late eleventh-century charter found in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.2.11, fol. 202v:

And ðis is seo gewitnisse, Iohan alurices sune, & Nicole & Ailric & Randolf, Alword cild, Osbern clopeles sune Ricard a paules stret, & Ricard theodbaldes meg, & Andreu & Serle, & Saluin & Seric & Huberd Randolf cotes sune. Osbern hod Pilegrim Ialebriht Gesfrei se coc & Pierres se niulier Ailric, & Gales. And se þe þis undo, habbe he godes curs & Sanctę Marie & sanctes Petres & ealle Cristes halgena a butan ende. Amen.

(And this is the list of witnesses: Iohan, Aluric’s son; & Nicole & Ailric & Randolf, Alword’s children; Osbern, Clopel’s son; Richard in [St.] Paul’s Street; & Ricard, Theodbald’s kinsman; & Andreu & Serle & Saluin and Seric, and Huberd, Randolf Cot’s son; Osbern Hod pilgrim; Ialebriht Gesfrei, the cook; & Pierres, the wafer-baker; Ailric; & Gales. And may he who shall void this have the curse of God and of St. Mary and St. Peter and all of Christ’s saints ever without end. Amen.)

It’s also found in an Old English translation of the Rule of St. Benedict, in a chapter about how visitors to the monastery should be treated:

Ða heane & þa pilegrimes ealre geornest beon underfangene, forþam þe Crist on heom swiðest byð anfangen.

(Paupers and pilgrims should all be welcomed most conscientiously, because in them Christ is especially welcomed.)

Benedict’s original Latin uses peregrinus.

In these two Old English examples, the context does not make clear exactly what is meant by pilgrim, but it probably simply meant traveler. This meaning is made clear in Laȝamon’s Brut, a poem probably written in the late twelfth century, with the text found in London, British Library, Cotton Caligula MS A.ix which was copied c. 1275. The poem gives a history of Britain and is one of the earlier sources of the King Arthur Legend. But Arthurian lore does not appear in this passage which clearly uses pilgrim to mean nothing more than a traveler, in this case an itinerant workman:

Þa he iuaren hafde; fulle seouen nihte
þa imette he enne pilegrim; pic bar an honde
hiȝend-liche þe com; from þas kingges hirede
Brien hine gon fræine; of his fare-coste
þe pillegrim him talde; al þat he wolde
Wið him warfte Brien; al his iweden
and æiþer gon liðe; þider him to luste
Brien enne smið funde; þe wel cuðe smiðie
and saide þat he wes pelegrim; ah pic nefden he nan mid him
þene þridde dæi þer bi-fore; at his inne he wes forlore

(When he had traveled seven full nights,
Then he met a pilgrim who bore a pick in his hand
who had hastily come from the king’s employ.
Brian went to ask him of his business;
The pilgrim told him all that he would.
Brian exchanged all his garments with him,
And both went on their way as it pleased them.
Brian found a smith who could smithy well
And said that he was a pilgrim, but he had no pick with him;
Three days before it had been lost at his inn.)

But at about the same time that Laȝamon’s Brut was being written, pilgrim was acquiring the sense of someone on a spiritual or religious journey. Perhaps the most famous religious pilgrims are Chaucer’s fourteenth-century fictional pilgrims, who travel to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, as referenced in the quotation above. But they are not the first such religious travelers. The Latin peregrinus acquires this meaning in the eleventh century, and an twelfth-century hagiography of Saint Katherine uses pilgrim in this sense too. The manuscript, British Library, Royal MS 17A.xxvii, which was copied c. 1225, reads:

I þæt ilke stude, anan,
iwurðen twa wundres.
Þe an of þe twa wes,
þæt ter sprong ut, mid þe dunt,
milc imenget wið blod,
to beoren hire witnesse
of hire hwite meiðhad.
Þe oðer wes, þæt te engles
lihten of heuene,
& heuen hire on he up,
& beren forð hire bodi,
& biburieden hit
i þe munt of Synai,
þer Moyses fatte
þe lahe et ure lauerd,
from þeonne as ha deide
twenti dahene ȝong,
& ȝet ma, as pilegrimmes,
þæt wel witen, seggeð.

(In that same place, instantly,
two miracles were performed.
The first of the two was
that there sprung out, with the blow,
milk mingled with blood,
to bear her witness of her pure virginity.
The other was, that the angels
descended from heaven,
and carried her on up high,
and bore forth her body,
and buried it
in the mount of Sinai,
where Moses received
the law from our Lord,
from the place where she died
twenty day’s journey,
and even more, as pilgrims,
who know well, say.)

In this case, the comment about the pilgrims does not appear in the original Latin found in British Library, Cotton Caligula MS A.viii. That was an addition by the English translator.

The first person to label those Puritans who settled in New England in 1620 pilgrims was one of their own, William Bradford. In his 1630 History of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford wrote:

So they lefte yt goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12. years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to ye heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.

The “goodly & pleasante citie” is Leyden in The Netherlands. Bradford is making a biblical reference here, to the New Testament letter to the Hebrews 11:13. The passage is about the Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs, and specifically to Abraham and Sarah who lived a nomadic existence. The Authorized or King James Version of the verse reads:

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Given the religious inclinations of the Puritans, Many Americans today probably associate this use of pilgrim with the sense of a spiritual journey, but while his use has a religious connotation, Bradford is primarily using it in the sense of a wanderer, and exile.

Other writers picked up on Bradford’s use and soon the appellation became common. One of the more famous was Cotton Mather, who uses it in his 1702 history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana. In one passage he paraphrases Bradford:

After the fervent Supplications of this Day, accompanied by their affectionate Friends, they took their leave of the pleasant City, where they had been Pilgrims and Strangers now for Eleven Years.

And in another, Mather evokes the rootlessness of an exile:

And indeed they found upon almost all Accounts a new World, but a World in which they found that they must live like Strangers and Pilgrims.

So, the pilgrims we associate with Thanksgiving have more in common with Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard than they do with Chaucer’s traveling company.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. pelerin.

Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation (1630). Charles Deane, ed. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1856, 59. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Brook, G. L. and R. F. Leslie. Laȝamon: Brut, vol. 2 of 2. Early English Text Society, 277.  London: Oxford UP, 1978, lines. 15342–348.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. c. 1387. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. peregrinus.

Einenkel, Eugen, ed. The Life of Saint Katherine. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1884, lines 2486–2504, 121. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Ford, John (dir.). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck (screenplay). Paramount Pictures, 1962.

Fox, Cyril and Bruce Dickens, eds. The Early Cultures of North-West Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1950, 366–67, including Plate 12. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702, 1.6, 2.3. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. pilgrim, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. pilgrim, n.

Schröer, Arnold, ed. Die Winteney-Version der Regula S. Benedicti. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1888, 107. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Venarde, Bruce L. The Rule of Saint Benedict. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 6. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, 174.

Image credit: San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9, f. 153v.

Video credit: “Pilgrim..”, 13 December 2007. YouTube.

turkey (bird)

A tom turkey, Meleagris gallopovo, displaying during mating season

23 November 2020

Through a series of mistaken identities, Meleagris gallopovo, which graces many an American Thanksgiving table, shares the name turkey with its cousin species Meleagris ocellata. The common turkey ranges from Mexico to southeastern Canada, while the oscellated turkey is confined to the Yucatan in Mexico.

The name turkey comes from a conflation with another bird of the of Galliformes order, the guineafowl. That bird, which is native to Africa and hence its name, comprises a number of species in the family Numididae. Although they are rather distant cousins, the guineafowl and the turkey resemble one another and can be easily confused by laypeople.

Guineafowls were given the name turkey because the bird was introduced to Western Europe by Turkish merchants in the mid sixteenth century. In 1541, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer promulgated a protocol on what should be served at official meals which refers to turkey cocks, a probable reference to guineafowl:

It was also provided, that of the greater fyshes or fowles there should be but one in a dishe, as crane, swan, turkeycocke, hadocke, pyke, tench; and of lesse sortes but two, viz. capons two, pheasantes two, conies two, wodcockes two.

A helmeted guineafowl, Numida meleagris, at Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

A few years later, in 1542, the second edition of Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca Eliotae makes an unambiguous reference to guineafowl as turkeys:

Meleagrides, byrdes, whiche we doo call hennes of Genny, or Turkie hennes.

When European explorers encountered the North American bird, they gave it the name of the similar-looking bird they were familiar with. There are two references to turkeys in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera’s Latin Decadas del nuevo mundo (Decades of the New World). Both of these references occur in the marginalia. The first of these is a reference to the birds found along the shores of the Gulf of Paria, in what is now Venezuela. The text reads:

With the golde and frankensence whiche the presented to owre men, they gaue them also a greate multitude of theyr peacockes,bothe cockes and hennes, deade and alyue, aswell to satisfie theyr present necessitie, as also to cary with theym into Spayne for encrease.

And in margin is printed:

Peacockes which wee caule Turkye cockes.

And later, describing an incident near Cozumel in the Yucatan, Eden writes:

Owre men wente and they came accordynge to their promisse and brought with them eyght of their hennes beynge as bygge as peacockes, of brownyshe coloure, and not inferiour to peacockes in pleasaunte tast.

And again, there is a marginal note which here reads:

Turky hens

In both cases, d’Anghiera’s original Latin uses pavo or peacock—like the peacock, the turkey has multi-colored feathers and a fanned tail, so there is a vague resemblance. Eden does a word-for-word translation in the main text but adds the marginal notes to indicate that it is actually a different bird. But just as d’Anghiera conflated the newly discovered bird with the peacock, Eden conflated it with the guineafowl.

That’s how a series of mistakes led to us eating turkey on Thanksgiving.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anghiera, Pietro Martire. De rebus oceanicis & orbe nouo decades tres. Basil: Ioannem Bebelium, 1533, 38, 72. Internet Archive.

Constitutio Thomae Cranmeri (1541), in Wilkins, David. Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, vol. 3 of 4. London: R. Gosling, 1737, 862. Hathitrust Digital Archive.

Eden, Rycharde. The Decades of the New Worlde. London: William Powell, 1555, 79r, 158v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotae, second edition. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1552. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. turkey, n.2, turkey-hen, n., turkey-cock, n.

Image credit: Turkey: unknown photographer, c. 2009, public domain image; guineafowl: unknown photographer 2007, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Thanksgiving

An Idealized and historically inaccurate painting of the Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621: a white man standing in prayer at table around which are seated White people and three Native American chiefs, in Plains-Indian dress, with a larger group of Native Americans sitting off to one side on the ground, a White woman and four children are in the foreground

22 November 2020

Thanksgiving is a North American holiday celebrated in the autumn. In the United States, it commemorates an October 1621 celebration by the settler-colonists of Plymouth in what is now Massachusetts for surviving their first year. The “First Thanksgiving,” a name retroactively applied to the event, was multi-day harvest festival attended by the settler-colonists and a number of Wampanoag Indians. There also was an earlier 1619 thanksgiving celebration in Virginia which has been largely ignored by popular histories.

The etymology is quite obvious, the compounding of thanks + giving, that is a holiday ostensibly dedicated to prayers to the divine. The concept, which is that of a harvest festival, if not the name, can be found in cultures worldwide. For those few unfamiliar with the North American tradition, in its modern incarnation it involves a gathering of family and friends and a turkey dinner, with stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams, assorted vegetables, pumpkin pie, and, if you’re from Baltimore, sauerkraut.

The Thanksgiving holiday was celebrated intermittently and usually unofficially until 1870, especially in New England, the most famous instance being Abraham Lincoln’s wartime proclamation of a holiday of “Thanksgiving and Praise” in November 1863. In 1870 the holiday was made permanent, although the date has varied over the years. Since 1941 it has been celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.

As in United States, early celebrations of Thanksgiving in Canada were unofficial and intermittent until 1879, when the holiday was made permanent and official. At first, it was celebrated in early November, but in 1957 the holiday was moved to the second Monday in October to avoid conflict with Armistice Day and having two holidays in one week.

Canadian Thanksgiving is sometimes said to date to 1578 when Martin Frobisher’s expedition in search of a Northwest Passage celebrated a communion service in thanks of being delivered from the perils of the ice, but this would seem to be a retrofitting of an obscure and minor event to find a historical justification for the holiday, especially a justification that one-ups the United States in terms of precedent.

The word’s history, however, is older than the North American holiday. The word thanksgiving, in the sense of a general giving of thanks to God, dates to at least 1533 when William Tyndale uses it in his tract The Souper of the Lorde:

And for this so incomparable benefyt of oure redempcio[n] (whiche were solde bondmen to synne) to gyue thankis vnto God the father for so mercyfull a delyuerance thorowe the deathe of Iesu Cryste, euery one, some synginge and some saynge deuoutely, some or other psalme or prayer of thankes geuinge in the mother tonge.

The use of thanksgiving to denote a public celebration can be found as early as 1641, when Edward Nicholas, an English government official, makes reference to such in celebration of an agreement between England and Scotland:

And att a conference of both houses it was resolved that there shalbe on ye 7th of September next a publique thanksgiving for this good accord betweene ye 2 nacions.

As mentioned, the original Plymouth settler-colonists did not refer to their celebration as Thanksgiving. The earliest reference to Thanksgiving as the name of the American holiday that I’m aware of dates to 1671, when John Josselyn makes note of it in his 1674 An Account of Two Voyages to New-England:

The Eight day of October being Wednesday, I boarded the new-Supply of Boston 120 Tun, a Ship of better sail than defence, her Guns being small, and for salutation only, the Master Capt. Fairweather, her sailers 16. and as many passengers. Towards night I returned to Boston again, the next day being Thanksgiving day, on Fryday the Tenth day we weighed Anchor and fell down to Hull.

Hull is an island several miles southeast of Boston, not the port in Yorkshire. It seems Josselyn made an error in writing October when he meant November. Not only does the November date accord better with the preceding and following events in his account, but 9 October 1671 was a Monday, while 9 November was a Thursday. But given how the celebration has moved around the calendar over the centuries, that error seems appropriate.

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Sources:

Josselyn, John. An Account of Two Voyages to New-England. London: Giles Widdows, 1674, 213–14. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Nicholas, Edward. Letter to H. Vane, 14 August 1641. The Nicholas Papers, vol. 1 of 4. George F. Warner, ed. Camden Society Publications, New Series 60. Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1886, 10. Hathitrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. thanksgiving, n.

Tyndale, William. The Souper of the Lorde. Antwerp: Niclas Twonson, 1533, fol. 30v–31r.

Image credit: “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” Jennie A. Brownscombe, 1914, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Netherlands, public domain image.