29 July 2021
In present-day usage, to saunter is to walk idly or leisurely, to stroll. The etymology is uncertain, but it most likely developed from the Middle English saunteren, meaning to wonder or muse, to be in a state of reverie. Over time, the meaning shifted from mental to physical wandering. The origin of the Middle English verb is unknown.
The word first appears as a gerund—that is verb form that functions as a noun—in the first half of the fifteenth century, where it means babbling, or talking meaninglessly or idly. We find it in two of the York mystery plays—the York plays are a cycle of biblical stories from creation to the Apocalypse, each play being staged by a different guild. One of these, the Crucifixion play, was performed by the guild of pinners, that is nail-makers. In the passages from this play, a group of four Roman soldiers are discussing Christ’s guilt prior to nailing him to the cross:
IV Miles: I hope þat he hadde bene as goode
Have sesed of sawes þat he uppe-sought.
I Miles: Thoo sawes schall rewe hym sore,
For all his saunteryng, sone.
(4th Soldier: I believe he would have done well to have ceased the teachings that he invented.
1st Soldier: For all his sauntering, those teachings he shall soon sorely regret.)
(The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary (MED) defines this usage as “idle chatter, babbling.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in an entry from 1910, questions whether the appearances in the York play are the same word as the present-day saunter. The OED editors’ concern arises out of the notion that the idea of loitering or leisurely strolling doesn’t fit the context. But when one places it in the context of a transition from musing to babbling to walking without purpose, then it fits nicely. The OED goes on to suggest that the York plays may be verbing the noun sauntrell, which means a pretend or false saint. This suggestion fits the context, as well, but requires the invention of a verb that has no other citations of use. The OED entry is over a century old, and I suspect when it is updated for the third edition this commentary will be changed.)
The verb meaning to muse, to think idly appears by the late fifteenth century, where it can be found in the Romance of Partenay:
And when Gaffray, ualliant man and wurthy,
Had radde thys tablet, he moch meruelling;
But yut he knew noght uerray certainly,
But santred and doubted uerryly
Wher on was or no of this saide linage.
(And when Gaffrey, a valiant man and worthy, had read this tablet, he marvelled greatly; but yet he knew nothing for certain, but sauntered and doubted the truth of whether or not he was of this lineage.)
By the mid sixteenth century, the noun saunter is in place, but with the meaning of a charm or incantation. Here is a passage from William Turner’s book of herbology about the collection of seeds from a fern, in which he associates saunter with incantations used in witchcraft. But this is another case where the word, spelled saunters, may be a different word from the present-day saunter. The text in question is a translation of a Latin text, and the word being translated is preculis, meaning prayers or requests. It could refer to bogus incantations or meaningless words, or it might be an alteration of sanctus, the angelic hymn, a word taken from the opening words sanctus, sanctus, sanctus (holy, holy, holy). The text in question, which is about the seeds of ferns, or brakes, reads:
Manye brakes in some places had no sede at all / but in other places agayne: a man shall fynde sede in euerye brake / so that a man maye gather a hundred oute of one brake alone / but I went aboute this busynes / all figures / coniurynges / saunters / charmes / wytchcrafte / and sorseryes sett a syde / takynge wyth me two or three honest men to bere me co[m]panye / when I soughte this seede.
But by the mid seventeenth century, we see an unequivocal use of saunter in which the meaning has shifted from mental to physical wandering. From William Wycherley’s 1669 Hero and Leander in Burlesque:
In the mean time to th' May-pole, and the Green
She bid him go to see, and to be seen,
Or where he wou'd might saunter up and down,
And count the Signs, and fine things of the Town
And that is the sense that persists to the present day.
But saunter has a persistent false etymology that has dogged the word since the late seventeenth century. That is the idea that the word derives from the French sainte terre or holy land. According to the false etymology the French term was associated with medieval pilgrims to Palestine and gradually morphed into saunter. There is no evidence to support this etymology, and as we have seen, the physical wandering sense arises after the medieval era.
But early on, this etymology had the backing of most dictionaries. The first to plump for it was John Ray’s 1691 A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, which defines it as:
To Santer about; or go Santering up and down. It is derived from Saincte terre, i.e. The Holy Land, because of old time when there were frequent Expeditions thither: many idle persons went from place to place, upon pretence that they had taken, or intended to take the Cross upon them, and to go thither. It signifies to idle up and down, to go loitering acount.
A few years later, the 1699 New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew has the following:
Saunter, to loiter idly, a Term borrowed from those Religious Counterfeits, who under the colour of Pilgrimages, to the Holy Land, us’d to get many Charities, crying still, Sainct Terre, Sainct terre, having nothing but the Holy Land in their Mouths, tho’s they stay’d alwaies at Home.
In 1721, in Nathan Bailey, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary, cribs almost word for word from Ray’s earlier dictionary:
To SANTER [of Sancte Terre, F. or Sancta Terra, L. i.e., the Holy Land, because when there were frequent Expeditions to the Holy Land, many idle Persons went from Place to Place upon Pretence they had taken the Cross upon them, or intended to do so, and to go thither] to wander up and down.
And:
To SAUNTER [of sauter or sauteller, F. to dance, q.d. to dance to and fro, or of saincte terre, F.] to go idling up and down.
And Samuel Johnson’s great 1755 dictionary has:
aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land; or sans terre, as having no settled home.
We can forgive these early lexicographers for believing this etymology. It sounds plausible on its face, and they did not have resources to investigate that we do today. No serious lexicographer takes this etymology seriously nowadays, but it persists in the popular imagination. The persistence to the present day is largely due to two famous writers who plumped for it, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.
In his essay Walking, posthumously published in the June 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau wrote:
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that tis, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
The false etymology is not recorded in Muir’s writing, but a 1911 account by Albert Palmer has him advocating for it:
One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word 'hike,' is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains—not ‘hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike' through them." And John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way, he would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to examine some tiny seedling or to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers.
The Muir quote, in particular, can be found in memes throughout the internet, although it is unlikely that the words Palmer puts in Muir’s mouth were his exact words. The account appears sometime after the encounter, and one doubts that at the time Palmer was writing down what Muir was saying. Still, the gist of Muir’s point, including the etymology, is probably accurately recorded. It also seems likely that Muir was familiar with Thoreau’s essay, and that is probably the source of his belief.
Like the early lexicographers, we can forgive Thoreau’s and Muir’s mistake. By the sources of their day, they would not have been wrong. But we know better today. And while the Thoreau’s and Muir’s tales are charming and perhaps even poetic, that does not make them correct.
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