gun

Mons Meg, a fifteenth-century, 510mm (20 inches) bombard housed at Edinburgh Castle

2 December 2020

While we don’t know the origin with absolute certainty, the word gun appears to come from the woman’s name Gunnhildr, which is a compound of two Old Norse words, gunnr and hildr, which both mean war. Giving a weapon a woman’s name is hardly an unusual practice. Two famous examples are the fifteenth-century bombard in Edinburgh Castle known as Mons Meg (it was made in Mons in what is now Belgium) and the 420mm German WWI howitzer dubbed Big Bertha by Allied soldiers.

The word dates to the fourteenth century. From an inventory of munitions at Windsor Castle conducted in 1330–31:

Una magna balista de cornu quæ vocatur Domina Gunilda.

(A great ballista of horn which is called Lady Gunilda.)

A ballista is essentially a giant crossbow. So, in early use, gun would appear to refer to any kind of siege engine. But only a few years later an inventory of the Guildhall of London in September 1339 uses guns to refer to gunpowder cannons:

Item, in Camera Gildaulæ sunt sex Instrumenta de latone, vocitata Gonnes, et quinque roleres ad eadem. Item, peletæ de plumbo pro eisdem Instrumentis, quæ ponderant iiiie libræ et dimidium. Item, xxxii libræ de pulvere pro dictis Instrumentis.

(Item, in a room of the Guildhall are six instruments of brass, called guns, and five wheels of the same. Item, balls of lead for the same instruments, which weighing four hundredweight and a half pounds. Item, thirty-two pounds of powder for these instruments.)

Although these early appearances are in Latin texts, the word gun does not appear to be native Latin, but rather represents an English word. Note that both texts say the devices are “called” guns; they don’t say they “are” guns. This use of vocare is typical when the word is being glossed in another language.

Outside of the context of inventories, we see the word appear in the romance Sir Ferumbras, c. 1380. The text here makes a distinction between guns and ballistas or crossbows:

Þat wanne þe frensche þyderward; caste stones oþer tre,
Þay scholde with hure scheldes hard; kepe þe dent aȝe;
& summe scholde schete to þe frencshe rout; with gunnes & boȝes of brake,
Þat þay ne beo hardy to lokie out; defense aȝen hem to make.
And on þat oþer stage amidde; ordeynt he gunnes grete,
And oþer engyns y-hidde; wilde fyr to cast & schete.

(That when the French cast stones or trees in that direction,
They should with their hard shields keep the blows back;
& some would shoot, to the woe of the French, with guns and crossbows,
So that they would not be so valiant as to look out; making a defense against them.
And in that middle tier; he prepared the great guns,
And other hidden engines, to cast & shoot wildfire.)

The he in the penultimate line refers to the French engineer in charge of the siege. I have translated boȝes of brake as crossbows; literally it reads “bows of the crank.” It’s unclear whether the poet here meant guns to refer to gunpowder cannons or some other type of siege engine, but he may have meant cannons. Gunpowder cannons appeared in China c.1000 C.E. and in Europe in the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, written at about the same time, c.1378–80, makes mention of early gunpowder weapons:

That thrughout every regioun
Wente this foule trumpes soun,
As swifte as pelet out of gonne,
Whan fyr is in the poudre ronne.
And swiche a smoke gan out-wende
Out of his foule trumpes ende,
Blak, bloo, grenyssh, swartish reed,
As doth where that men melte leed,
Loo, al on high fro the tuel.

(So that throughout every region
Went this foul trumpet’s sound,
As swift as a pellet out of a gun,
When fire is in the powder run.
And such a smoke began to wend
Out of his foul trumpet’s end,
Black, blue, greenish, darkest red,
As does where men melt lead,
Lo, all on high from the chimney.)

Overtime, the non-firearm senses of gun dropped away, and the word came to be used to refer to a firearm of any caliber. Although, in my Army training I learned a more restrictive technical definition. According to this definition, a gun is large-caliber, high-velocity weapon with a flat trajectory, such as on a tank or a naval ship. Howitzers, which are large caliber but with relatively low muzzle velocities and arcing trajectories, and rifles and pistols, which are small caliber (i.e., small arms), are not guns. But this technical definition is not generally observed.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 1641–49, 367.

Herrtage, Sidney J., ed. The English Charlemagne Romances, Part I: Sir Ferumbras. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 34. London: Oxford UP, 1879, lines 3261–66, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 33).

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, gun, n.

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Memorials of London and London Life. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia, 2008.

Guinea

A 1663 guinea coin with the head of Charles II above a small elephant on the obverse and the shields of the four countries of the United Kingdom on the reverse

1 December 2020

Guinea is a word with many seemingly unrelated senses but which are actually connected. It can refer to one of several countries in Africa, a sum of British money equaling £1.05, or it can be a derogatory name for an Italian American.

The word first appears as a European name for the west coast of Africa. The name’s origin unknown, but it appears first in Portuguese as Guiné. This toponymic use survives today in the names of the countries of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Guinea makes its English language appearance in a 1555 translation of Pietro Martire Anghiera’s The Decades of the New Worlde:

The thyrde day of October abowt mydnyght, the capytayne commaunded theym to lyght fyrebrandes and to hoyse vp theyr sayles directynge theyr course towarde the South, saylynge betwene Capo Verde of Affryke and the Ilandes lyinge abowt the same, beinge from the Equinoctiall .xiiii. degrees and a halfe. They sayled thus, manye dayes in the syght of the coaste of Guinea, of Ethiope, where is the mountayne cauled Serra Liona beinge .viii. degrees aboue the Equinoctiall.

Guinea quickly became an adjective referring to anything from or having to do with Africa. A Guinea-man, for instance, was a ship that conducted trade, in slaves as well as in other cargo, with Africa. And in British North America, guinea came to denote a slave from Africa, as opposed to one born in the Americas. From an 18 April 1745 Boston newspaper:

That three Privateers belonging to New York, commanded by Capts. Langdon, Morgan and Jeffries, had brought in a Sloop to New Providence, which they took on the Spanish Main (deserted by all the Men except a Dutch Man and 4 Guinea Negroes,) on board of which they have found between 50 and 60,000 Dollars.

And by the early nineteenth century, Guinea was functioning as a noun referring to any Black person. From James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 The Pioneers:

But damn the bit of manners has the fellow any more than if he was one of them Guineas, down in the kitchen there.

And it continued to refer to Black and mixed-race people well into the twentieth century. For instance, a particular group of mixed race people in and around Barbour County, West Virginia went by that name. From Hu Maxwell’s 1899 history of that county, which reflects the racist attitudes that others held about them:

There is a clan of partly-colored people in Barbour County often called “Guineas,” under the erroneous presumption that they are Guinea negroes. They vary in color from white to black, often have blue eyes and straight hair, and they are generally industrious. Their number in Barbour is estimated at one thousand.

But in the late nineteenth century, Guinea came to be used as a derogatory name for Italian-Americans, and eventually other ethnicities from the Mediterranean region. Exactly why is unknown. It may be because many people from the Mediterranean have darker complexions than those typical of northern Europeans, or it may have been an epithet pointing to their place on the social ladder alongside Blacks. This appearance in the New York Tribune of 17 July 1882 shows that early use may have specifically been in reference to those born in Italy, as opposed to Italian-Americans born in North America, before expanding to include all Italian-Americans, an expansion that parallels the term’s expansion from those born in Africa to eventually include all Black people:

The “hoodlum” of New-York, with his senses deadened to the beauty of the Latin tongue and mellow Neapolitan accent, has bestowed upon the races that use it with volubility the names of “Guineas” and “Dagoes.”
[...]
The chances are strongly in favor of their receiving a shower of stones on the way, from the ragged gamins in the street, who cry out at every fresh arrival of Guineas. But they are soon with their countrymen, and when they see on every side Italian signs over the doorways and swart Italian faces peering out the windows, they feel themselves perfectly at home.

That leaves us with how guinea came to be associated with British currency. In 1663, the Royal Mint began issuing a gold coin, nominally worth 20 shillings, for use by the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa. As with other things associated with Africa, the coin quickly acquired the name guinea. From Samuel Pepys diary of 29 October 1666:

And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d change, will now cost me 22d, and but very few to be had at any price.

The sums that Pepys refers to are the fees charged by the goldsmith for converting silver into gold. The coin fluctuated in value, eventually ending up with a nominal value of 21 shillings before it stopped being issued in 1813. But the name guinea survived, mainly in specialty applications like gambling on horse racing, in the sense of 21 shillings, or in today’s decimal currency, £1.05.

So, that’s it. While the different senses seem, on the surface, to be unrelated, they all go back to Africa.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anghiera, Pietro Martire. The Decades of the New Worlde. Richard Eden, trans. London: Guilhelmi Powell for Edwarde Sutton, 1555, 217r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO)

The Boston Weekly News-Letter, 18 April 1745, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, vol. 3 of 3. London: John Murray, 1823, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. Guinea, n.1.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. guinea, n.1.

“The Italian Quarter.” The New York Tribune, 17 July 1882, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Maxwell, Hu. The History of Barbour County, West Virginia (1899). Parsons, West Virginia: McClain Printing, 1968, 310. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 7 of 10. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1972, 346. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Sovereign Rarities, Vcoins.com.

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.

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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.