"A sheaf of pocok arwes, bright and kene,
Under his belt he bar ful thriftily."
(A, 104.)
The name Pay is another form of the same word. Coe, whence Hedgecoe,
is an old name for the jackdaw--
"Cadow, or coo, or chogh (chough), monedula" (Prompt. Parv.)--
but may also stand for cow, as we find, in defiance of gender and sex,
such entries as Robert le cow, William le vache. Those birds which
have now assumed a font-name, such as Jack daw, Mag pie, of course
occur without it as surnames, e.g. Daw and Pye--
"The thief the chough, and eek the jangelyng pye" (Parliament of
Fowls, 305).
The latter has a dim. Pyatt.
Rainbird is a local name for the green woodpecker, but as an
East-Anglian name it is most likely an imitative form of Fr. Rimbaud
or Raimbaud, identical with Anglo-Sax. Regenbeald. Knott is the name
of a bird which frequents the sea-shore and, mindful of Cnut's wisdom,
retreats nimbly before the advancing surf--
"The knot that called was Canutus' bird of old."
(Drayton, Polyolbion, xxv. 368.)
This historical connection is most probably due to folk-etymology.
Titmus is of course for tit-mouse. Dialect names for the woodpecker
survive in Speight, Speke, and Spick, Pick (Chapter III). The same
bird was also called woodwall--
"In many places were nyghtyngales,
Alpes, fynches, and wodewales"
(Romaunt of the Rose, 567)--
hence, in some cases, the name Woodall. The Alpe, or bullfinch,
mentioned in the above lines, also survives as a surname. Dunnock and
Pinnock are dialect names for the sparrow. It was called in
Anglo-Norman muisson, whence Musson. Starling is a dim. of Mid. Eng.
stare, which has itself given the surname Starr
"The stare, that the counseyl can be-wrye." (Parliament of Fowls,
348.)
Heron is the French form of the bird-name which was in English Herne--
"I come from haunts of coot and hern." (Tennyson, The Brook, 1. 1.)
The Old French dim. heronceau also passed into English--
"I wol nat tellen of hir strange sewes (courses),
Ne of hir swannes, ne of hire heronsewes."
(F, 67.)
As a surname it has been assimilated to the local, and partly
identical, Hearnshaw (Chapter XII). Some commentators go to this word
to explain Hamlet's use of handsaw--
"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly,
I know a hawk from a handsaw" (Hamlet, ii. 2).
When the author's father was a boy in Suffolk eighty years ago, the
local name for the bird was pronounced exactly like answer. Grew is
Fr. grue, crane, Lat. grus, gru-. Butter, Fr. butor, "a bittor"
(Cotgrave), is a dialect name for the bittern, called a "butter-bump"
by Tennyson's Northern Farmer (1. 31). Culver is Anglo-Sax. culfre,
a pigeon--
"Columba, a culver, a dove"
(Cooper)--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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