27. +Norman Words+ (_d_).-- The terms connected with the chase are: +Brace+, +couple+; +chase+, +course+; +covert+, +copse+, +forest+; +leveret+, +mews+; +quarry+, +venison+. A few remarks about some of these may be interesting. +Brace+ comes from the Old French _brace_, an arm (Mod. French _bras_); from the Latin _brachium_. The root-idea seems to be that which encloses or holds up. Thus _bracing_ air is that which _strings_ up the nerves and muscles; and a _brace_ of birds was two birds tied together with a string. --The word +forest+ contains in itself a good deal of unwritten Norman history. It comes from the Latin adverb _foras_, out of doors. Hence, in Italy, a stranger or foreigner is still called a _forestiere_. A forest in Norman-French was not necessarily a breadth of land covered with trees; it was simply land _out of_ the jurisdiction of the common law. Hence, when William the Conqueror created the New Forest, he merely took the land _out of_ the rule and charge of the common law, and put it under his own regal power and personal care. In land of this kind-- much of which was kept for hunting in-- trees were afterwards planted, partly to shelter large game, and partly to employ ground otherwise useless in growing timber. --+Mews+ is a very odd word. It comes from the Latin verb _mutare_, to change. When the falcons employed in hunting were changing their feathers, or _moulting_ (the word _moult_ is the same as _mews_ in a different dress), the French shut them in a cage, which they called +mue+-- from _mutare_. Then the stables for horses were put in the same place; and hence a row of stables has come to be called a +mews+. --+Quarry+ is quite as strange. The word _quarry_, which means a mine of stones, comes from the Latin _quadrāre_, to make square. But the hunting term _quarry_ is of a quite different origin. That comes from the Latin _cor_ (the heart), which the Old French altered into +quer+. When a wild beast was run down and killed, the heart and entrails were thrown to the dogs as their share of the hunt. Hence Milton says of the eagle, “He scents his quarry from afar.” --The word +venison+ comes to us, through French, from the Lat. _venāri_, to hunt; and hence it means _hunted flesh_. The same word gives us _venery_-- the term that was used in the fourteenth century, by Chaucer among others, for hunting.