Some wonderful language in Peter Linebaugh’s CounterPunch review of Common People:
Common people used to be people of the commons. Leah Gordon & Stephen Ellcock with additional writing by Annabel Edwards, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (Watkins: London 2025) explain this in such a lovely book. It brings together word and picture. Of the 240 pages there is scarcely an image-less page and no image without good speech quoted along with. I will say something about each but first overall on this the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ Revolt the book is introduced by images of Albrecht Dürer’s “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.” […]
After this introduction we plunge right in to history and its dates, eight pages of clear timeline of enclosures and resistance. Here are the facts of the English class war between the Haves and the Have Nots. These facts form what E.P. Thompson would call “idioms” or “peculiarities of the English.” I looked up the word “idiom” in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and learned that it comes from a Greek word closely translated as “a manifestation of the peculiar” and Fowler explained that in the realm of speech this might refer to what is peculiar to the language of a people, the dialect of a district, or the vocabulary of a technique. The idiomatic exists alongside, though not against, abstract grammar. So it is with commoners and their powers of pasturage, estovers, turbary, pannage, piscary: all are idiomatic, that is, peculiar to language, district, and profession. Some might mistake the idiomatic with the incidental or trivial.
Look at the pictures of Crow Scaring, another of Twig Gathering, or Gleaners, or Leech Finders, or Acorn Knockers. We are invited to remember the world where Adam delved and Eve span. It is through them that we begin to find uncanny, magical, and spiritual relations. […]
The chapter on ‘Rural Rebels and Traditions’ begins with ten well-chosen illustrations with an emphasis on disguise, masking, cross-dressing, black face, fools, jesters, and mummers, and then a further two dozen photos and art of the resistance embedded in the deep folk history of opposition – the hobby horse, the straw bear, the sweep, Morris dancer, Jack-in-the-Green, oak apple day, the green man, mari lwyd, hoodening, the burryman. Like the Flora Britannica wonderfully described in Richard Mabey’s book of the same title, these popular forms are particular to place and peculiar to community life in the commons, “the granular minutiae of quotidian peasant activities.”
I have no nostalgia for the Old Ways and the life of the doughty peasantry, but I love granular minutiae and forgotten words. Thanks, Trevor!
As lagniappe, Pig-Cheer:
The good old Yorkshire custom of sending a present at pig-killing time to neighbours is in full life in Holderness. Holderness, however, differs somewhat from other parts of the country. In the neighbourhood of the city of York, for instance, it is always “pig-fry” which is sent—that is, a taste of liver, “leets” (or lungs), heart, etc., the whole neatly covered with a bit of the diaphragm. This part of the business also obtains in Holderness, but here there is an additional present sent later on. This second present consists of cooked, or at any rate prepared, articles, and generally includes a mince pie, a link or two of sausage, a bit of black-pudding, a “standin’ pie” (pork raised pie), with some times a bit of “chine.” The whole stock of articles sent, prepared or unprepared, is spoken of as “pig-cheer.” The liberality of the cottager on such occasions is very remarkable.
Click through to Laudator Temporis Acti for a photo.
Turbary rights are very much a live political issue in Ireland.
Re Pig-Cheer,
Üblich war bei einer Hausschlachtung, dass Metzelsuppe an die Nachbarn verschenkt wurde, die diese oft mit Milchkannen abholten. Oft kauften die Nachbarn dann auch etwas von den frischen Würsten oder erhielten für geleistete Mithilfe bei der Verarbeitung des Fleisches einen Anteil.
—
It was normal practice at a “Hausschlachtung” to give Metzelsuppe (a thick broth made by boiling sausages, liver and other chopped meat) to the neighbours, who came with large milk cans to collect it. The neighbours also bought, or were offered for their assistance with the preparation work, a portion of the freshly made sausages.
—
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlachtfest
The English version of the article for some reason suppresses “or were offered for their assistance…” and uses “milk churns” instead of “large milk cans” for Milchkannen.
@PP Brit Milk Churn = US Milk Can. IOW a metal container for transporting Milk, not for churning. There’s still a few (dilapidated) Milk churn stands beside rural roads in NZ, even a few alongside (disused) rail branch lines.
@AntC
Thanks. Now people will tell me that is used by farmers here as well. The word never came up, but I will ask a friend from a farming background.
A mid-19th-century reference book has a quotation from a 13th[?]-century Law Latin text providing that “Cum duo vel plures teneant boscum, turbariam, piscariam, vel alia, hujusmodi in communi, absque hoc quod aliquis sciat suum separale,” thus enabling some of these supposedly-exotic lexemes to be seen in the puristic obscurity of that language, rather than the French versions that got lexicalized into the lawyers-jargon register of English.
not for churning
That would be a Butter churn, obvs.
History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance
I wonder if the book goes in to the alleged Tragedy of the Commons, not something observed amongst the doughty peasantry, but completely made up by a couple of right-wing economists, who
delete pinko rant. The peasantry seem to exhibit far better wisdom about the lands they’ve been cultivating for generations.There’s still a few actual surviving collectively-managed commons: The New Forest — which is of course one of the oldest forests in England. In NZ/Pacifica there’s the Māori/indigenous system of rāhui
Tragedy of the commons, no matter who invented the term, certainly exists. The first example that springs to mind is rampant overfishing. But overgrazing is not a made up problem as well. As for people being able to overcome it without privatization (usually disfavored by people inclined on pinko rants), the work of Elinor Ostrom on it is completely mainstream economics (or poli-sci, whatever) by now.
Speaking of pinko rants, the review is a good example of how a certain sort of unrigorous pinko can get so down on capitalism and/or bourgeois-liberalism that they unironically romanticize the feudal order (complete with cool archaic vocabulary items!) it ruthlessly supplanted. Yer more rigorous pinkos might have instead taken the cold pseudo-scientific view that that supplanting had merely been a historically-inevitable Necessary Step toward the historically-inevitable ultimate manifestation of the utopian eschaton.
Marx hisownself actually praised Capitalism as a major engine of human progress* (and certainly an improvement on feudalism.)
That’s the trouble with the young pinkos of today. No grasp of Theory.
Now Enclosure, that’s the thing to have a good pinko rant about. An early manifestation of the handy concept of terra nullius.
There’s something to be said for the traditional system in the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, in which the chiefly hierarchy does not get to decide on questions of land use, which are the remit of the tindana “earth-priest” (theoretically the heir of the original indigenous settler.**)
That, too, is not a recipe for utopia, though. Plenty of scope for abuses. (You have to like the basic principle, though.)
* Though he thought it was unsustainable in the long term, of course (the silly fellow!)
** Unlike a chief, a tindana can even be a woman. Imagine!
(The lady’s not for churning.)
TFA does seem to have a touch of the Merrie Englands about it. (Memorably skewered in Lucky Jim.)
That’s immediately recognizable as an alternate spelling of “lights”, because, of course, lungs are indeed light, air-filled organs.
Of course, there never was any “Feudalism”, Comrade.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#Challenges_to_the_feudal_model
* How many Soviet Commissars does it take to change a lightbulb?
Fat-fingeredly accidently clicking on Hat’s link to Vasmer’s etymological dictionary, I discover that he was in fact Фасмер, à l’allemande. In hindsight, I suppose I should have twigged that his name was German. Apart from anything else, all etymologists are German until proved otherwise.
I’ve been mentally saying it wrong all this time.
Aww c’mon folks, play cricket! I voluntarily self-censor because our host’s been getting a hard time, And you go in boots’n’all anyway.
(“The lady’s …”, OTOH, was so obvious it was beneath censoring.)
Hey! I was supporting you (in a tepid sort of Brit way.)
I don’t think rational arguments, conducted in good faith, contravene any Hattic principles. JWB in particular strikes me as an exemplary practitioner in this regard (despite the fact that he seems, mysteriously, to disagree with my political and religious views at times. Odd, in one so courteous and erudite. A mystery …)
My withers are thoroughly unwrung at the notion that bigots, xenophobes and pushers of pseudoscience might feel that their views are unwelcome on this site and consequently be discouraged from commenting; conservative views free of such purulence are fine by me (though obviously mistaken. But I myself was mistaken on one ill-starred occasion in 1982. I remember the occasion vividly.)
I don’t think rational arguments, conducted in good faith, contravene any Hattic principles.
Exactly. As I said earlier, I like arguments, within parameters that I would have thought would be obvious to any reader of the blog (especially since I say in the sidebar “I have strong opinions and sometimes express myself more sharply than an ideal interlocutor might, but I try to avoid personal attacks, and I hope you will do the same”). But I do not tolerate fascists/bigots who express their repulsive views openly (I don’t care about the private opinions of people who limit their actual comments to language-related stuff), and I don’t tolerate open insults directed at other commenters (which you, AntC, have too often been guilty of, though I appreciate your learning to self-censor).
And just to be clear, I don’t have anything against actual conservatives — people who believe that companies should be allowed to make all the profit they can, that a strong national defense is necessary, etc.; I don’t agree with them, but I understand where they’re coming from and I’m happy to chat about it. Racism, sexism, and the other phenomena I’ve lumped under “bigotry” are not conservatism, they’re just assholery, and I won’t have it.
“Estovers” is one of those wonderful Law French words …
I stll remember my university girlfriend (a lawyer) moaning about Promissory Estoppel (another wonderful Law French word) and blaming Lord Denning for complicating the lives of UK law students with it*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_London_Property_Trust_Ltd_v_High_Trees_House_Ltd
“Estoppel”, like “estover”, is a word I would love to casually drop into conversation at parties, if I had more than the haziest idea of what it actually meant.
* I see that it’s been around a lot longer in US law. Creeping Americanisation, I calls it. When Aud the Deep-Minded bought the whole of Dalasýsla for a sealskin, this was held to be binding because there was a consideration …
In current US legal jargon “estoppel” is a quite common word. (There are lots of subgenres of it – “promissory” is only one of them.) By contrast I may not ever have had professional occasion to use either “estover” or “turbary” in over 30 years of practice.
FWIW from a dismal-science perspective I think turbary would present at least different potential tragic-commons issues than piscary, Absent overfishing or other changes of ecological circumstance, a new supply of catchable fish will likely keep getting spawned each year whereas peat is not a renewable resource within the timescales we are making public policy for.
@jwb
I thik it is not just the peat, but the entire ecosystem (there are plants, birds, frogs, etc., that are found only in the bogs). Also even before the peat forms fully, the bog serves as a carbon sink. But basically, yes.
I had no idea. Gemetzel means “massacre” as in “very unequal battle”, though.
One particularly clear example of the latter would seem to be Sevan Nişanyan, whose etymological dictionary of Turkish is accessible right next to that comment, as it happens. All etymologists proved not to be German are Armenian until proved otherwise…?
I thought feudalism is extremely easy to define: it is the mafia. You pay protection money and a lot of respect to the boss, his wife and his heirs, and he protects you from the other bosses.
Was there ever a lightbulb?
“How many Microsoft programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. Microsoft declares darkness the standard.”
@PlPad: I think the question whether the situation in which a bunch of individual local folks have quasi-feudal rights of turbary on a particular bog leads to dramatically more (or perhaps dramatically less!) peat-per-year being cut than would happen in the alternative scenario where a single owner (let’s say a greedy corporation …) owns and controls the entire bog not subject to any such rights of others. If so, there may be a tragic-commons problem. If not but there are other perceived problems because e.g. the sole-corporate-owner is not adequately incentivized to care about frog welfare at the expense of marginal profiting-from-peat-sales etc., those problems aren’t necessarily best viewed through the tragic-commons framework.
… Absent overfishing or other changes of ecological circumstance, a new supply of catchable fish will likely keep getting spawned each year…
So, then, we shouldn’t concern ourselves with dams, fish ladders, unregulated discharges into
spawning rivers, or the resulting reduction in the ‘new supply of catchable fish’?
The words quoted above imply a stable condition with exceptions noted. That’s not quite a reflection of current conditions.
feudalism
It’s not a discussion I have followed in any depth, and TBH I probably don’t know enough about the issues involved to follow it if I had, but I think the basic idea is that the reality of governance in mediaeval Europe was so very diverse and complex that to use a single snappy label like “feudalism” for it all obscures more than it illuminates.
This sort of appeal to messy particulars over sweeping generalisation appeals to me in principle, but it still seems to me that sweeping generalisations can sometimes have their place, so long as one pays due attention to the sweepingness.
I read an interesting book about feudalism in mediaeval Japan once, the moral of which was that it was quite like feudalism in mediaeval Europe, except where it wasn’t at all.
The traditional Mossi-Dagomba setup has been called “feudal”, on the grounds that it works via a network of kings with regional subkings and village chiefs under the subkings, with subordinates owing military service to their superiors. But the whole theory of land use and land ownership is quite different. No king has the power to “enfeoff” anyone.
not adequately incentivized to care about frog welfare at the expense of marginal profiting-from-peat-sales etc
Mainstream economists have put a lot of thought into the general issue involved in this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
@cuchuflete: I intended “ecological circumstance” to be read broadly enough to encompass all the things you mention. The classic overfishing scenarios often unfold most dramatically in the context of the open ocean, where the supply seems so vast as to be unlimited until it isn’t. In the context of a river, coordinating the desires of the humans who value the river primarily as a place that will predictably be teeming with fish they can catch with the conflicting desires of other humans who value other uses of the same river more highly is sort of a different level of problem than that of merely coordinating the desires of those who do want to catch fish with each other so as to avoid aggregate overfishing.
@JWB, I was’t attacking either you or your very reasonable comments. Rather I had hoped to point to the complexities of, for example, salmon populations. They are ocean fish, but spawn in rivers, so that circumstances in one locale, freshwater, impact the available ocean population.
Here’s an example of the junction of salt and freshwater fisheries.
https://damariscottamills.org/
The megafauna of North American are less enamored of pre-capitalist natural resource exploitation than most extant fauna.
>>… not adequately incentivized to care about frog welfare at the expense of marginal profiting-from-peat-sales etc
>Mainstream economists have put a lot of thought into…
Maybe, but will you concede that their thinking on the matter starts out so unfiltered that it tends to get bogged down before it gets anywhere?
I’d probably concede it if I understood. How do you mean, “unflitered”?
That’s immediately recognizable as an alternate spelling of “lights”, because, of course, lungs are indeed light, air-filled organs
“lungs” are etymologically also derived from the word meaning “light” (as are some Slavic and Romance words for lungs, too, like Russian Лёгкие)
I thought feudalism is extremely easy to define: it is the mafia. You pay protection money and a lot of respect to the boss, his wife and his heirs, and he protects you from the other bosses.
An important difference, AIUI, being that in feudalism the boss is also probably your landlord and your boss in the sense of employer.
>I’d probably concede it if I understood. How do you mean, “unflitered”?
It was just a mainstream vs. bog joke. I probably shouldn’t have muddied the waters here with it.
Ah.
BTW the English imported commons-tragedies into not-entirely-post-feudal colonial New England. Quoth wikipedia: “During the 1630s, [Boston] Common was used by many families as a cow pasture. This traditional use for a commons quickly ended when the large herds kept by affluent families led to overgrazing and the collapse of the Common as pastureland. In 1646, grazing was limited to 70 cows at a time. The Common continued to host cows until they were formally banned in 1830.”
Which of course somehow reminded me that the common referred to in one of the Seventies’ greatest lost-to-unfortunate-obscurity songs, “Common at Noon,” is the Boston one as explained in the (non-rhotic!) spoken-word intro to this live version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id8YIKgVcZw
I confess I’d never heard of the Real Kids, but I see their leader John Felice was in the first line-up of the Modern Lovers and later a roadie for the Ramones — that’s what I call pedigree.
[Coming late, without reading all the links.]
The real question is not if there is such a thing as the tragedy of the commons, but why it sometimes occurs and sometimes not. A related question is why overexploitation occurs even when the resources are privately owned.
–
From the quote of Peter Linebaugh’s review:
This somehow misses the etymological point that all terms belong to the Romance superstrate, a fact that should say something about how and when those institutions developed.
no, what’s definitively disproven is the idea of “the tragedy of the commons” – the fantasy that holding resources in common for direct use by those who need them leads to their fatal depletion. it doesn’t happen. there’s a whole literature on this.
importantly, “the tragedy of the commons” as its inventors laid it out doesn’t have anything to do with the effects of profit-seeking extraction on resources held (or previously held) in common – which is devastating to both the commoning communities and the resources, whether the extraction is through enclosure or licensing (see the quote about the Boston Common, above, for instance). the TotC fantasists were fine with any form of devastation as long as it was in pursuit of individual profit rather than community subsistence – justifying profit-driven extraction was the entire point of their garbage.
what’s wild – and says a ton about the social sciences as disciplines – is that their fantasy was given any credence at all, given well, damn near everything we know about history, resource-use, and extraction industries.
there are arguments to have about peat-harvesting for individual farms’ use, under turbary or otherwise, but they’re almost completely different from the ones to be had about peat-harvesting for profit (which i, predictably, don’t think there’s any legitimate defense of). as well as involving entirely different motives and imperatives, the difference between the two modes of bog-cutting is very material in its impact: it would be very very hard for any level of contemporary turbary peat-use to approach the scale of peat-harvesting that was practiced for centuries without lasting harm to the bogs (many fewer peat-heated houses; massively more efficient stoves; etc), while profit-driven extraction exists to maximize its harvest and will speedily destroy the bogs (creating new markets for the peat as needed) to maintain its pace of profit-increase.
Despite Ireland’s many well-regarded peat bogs, one of the basic distinctions between Irish whiskey and Scotch whisky that the proverbial every-schoolboy knows is that the former has no hint of peatiness in its taste. But the internet informs me that apparently it was capitalism that took the peat out the whiskey and is now (maybe, if the right hipster market can be fully developed) putting it back in. https://www.masterofmalt.com/blog/post/peated-irish-whiskey-a-lost-tradition-reignited.aspx/
Rozele: no, what’s definitively disproven is the idea of “the tragedy of the commons” – the fantasy that holding resources in common for direct use by those who need them leads to their fatal depletion. it doesn’t happen. there’s a whole literature on this.
I know, and I am generally sympathetic to the argument, but it does take some careful definition of “commons”. People are capable of overexploiting their resources with or without private property and profit-seeking. The interesting question is how the common develops as an effective institution for resource management, and, crucially, how it sometimes doesn’t or breaks down. Under what constraints can overexploitation be rational human behavior?
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (introduction), seems to be exactly about this — technical words from the British Isles, obsoleted along with their specializations, apparently with a whole chapter on peat vocabulary. I saw it mentioned in a Bsky account linked to by J Pystynen’s, and was going to write you about it. From the little I saw quoted, I am not sure where it is on the scale between poetic and twee, or whether it is guilty of tingo-style exoticism, but in any case it has some good stuff in it.
Thank you for writing that healthy corrective and constructive comment, rozele, and getting things back on track!
I think I have something to say that’s socially progressive and might give rozele and the other commenters some food for thought. Can I, with the host’s permission, make a brief comment relevant to the discussion?
There are two kinds of farmer. One kind is the agro-firm where you have a company (doesn’t matter if it’s private or state owned) owning the land and equipment and hiring laborers on a contractual basis. The other is the peasant family, where a family owns the land and equipment and most of the labor is performed by the family itself. The ‘peasant’ is not some bygone figure of the past, they still exist everywhere, even in ‘developed’ countries.
As Dutch professor Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg has shown, despite what most people would think, the majority of the world’s food is still produced by peasants. He has also shown that the peasant model of agriculture is highly resilient, and, again, despite what most people imagine, actually more productive and more profitable than the firm model.
For him, it’s clear what we need to do as a society to improve the quantity and quality of agricultural products and the ecological balance of mother nature: help the world’s peasants prosper.
Trond made the important point above that pasturage, estovers, turbary, pannage, and piscary are all from the “Romance superstrate” in English. Most of the words that Macfarlane bangs on about and romanticizes in the piece Y linked to are by contrast not from that superstrate, but then he notes that “[f]orest – like numerous wood-words – is complicatedly tangled up in political histories of access and landownership.” And indeed “forest” is from that superstrate and early on was arguably as technical a bit of Law French jargon as the others. (It maybe doesn’t look all that Romantic, but its etymon may have come into Late Latin from a Germanic source.)
J.W. Brewer’s article about Irish peat whiskey was interesting but may gloss over the fact that in modern times the most important difference between whiskey and poitín is not so much that the latter is illegal but rather than it is unaged (see recent “legal poitíns” and cf,recent discussion on “brandy” vs eau-de-vie),
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (introduction), seems to be exactly about this — technical words from the British Isles, obsoleted along with their specializations, apparently with a whole chapter on peat vocabulary. I saw it mentioned in a Bsky account linked to by J Pystynen’s, and was going to write you about it.
I actually own that book but haven’t gotten around to it yet — sorry, Robert!
rozele: the TotC fantasists were fine with any form of devastation as long as it was in pursuit of individual profit rather than community subsistence – justifying profit-driven extraction was the entire point of their garbage.
The tragedy of you’re a dick.
Thank you for writing that healthy corrective and constructive comment, rozele, and getting things back on track!
Seconded.
Oops, yes. Feudalism is when the mafia has merged with the state, as in Russia since 2000.
Perfect name for that topic (to which I can’t contribute).
Turbary rights are very much a live political issue in Ireland.
As is estovers, if it applies to cutting down trees in the national forests, in much if the U.S.—”much” by land area, not population. But I don’t remember seeing the word till this thread.
I’ve never come across estovers in my professional life, but I just did a search and it appears that in earlier times disputes about estovers did get litigated in the courts of the State of New York from time to time, although the most recent mention I saw (at a quick skim not 100% guaranteed to be completely accurate) was from 1904 and there were very few others after 1850.
Here’s an exciting sentence from Chancellor Walworth’s 1833 decision in Van Rensselaer v. Brice: “From the answer, it appears that the defendant, as the assignee of the lease to Slingerland, given in 1767, was entitled to estovers, for building, fencing and fuel, in the lands of the manor which were not fenced or perticularly appropriated or demised by the proprietors thereof; and that the conveyance to the complainant was without consideration, and made for the sole purpose of defrauding the defendant of his right to estovers.”
Note that the van Rensselaer dynasty continued to administer its manor in a quasi-feudal manner (see what I did there?) until the death of Stephen III (“the Good Patroon”) in 1839 was followed by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rent_War, which led to the demise of those particular feudal vestiges in the Hudson valley.
“Socage” just has to be the best name EVAH for a feudal form of land tenure. Better even than frankalmoin.
The first house I ever bought (in Scotland) came with a feudal superior mentioned in the deeds. As far as I recall, there was no military commitment involved.
Scotland has always led the way in progressive reform …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._(Scotland)_Act_2000
The English only caught up in 1660:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenures_Abolition_Act_1660
For me, socage is always associated with gavelkind.
The tragedy of you’re a dick.
if the invisible hand offend thee, cut it off!
The title just keeps getting better!
Oh. That was me, misclicking.
Apparently thirlage was largely, but not completely, done away with in Scotland by the transparently-named Thirlage Act 1799, but some remnant remained on the books for another 201 years. Whether that remnant had in fact been causing some practical disadvantage or simply ended up on someone’s list of obsolete things to be tied up for mostly theoretical reasons is not clear to me. To the extent thirlage would unexpectedly turn out to have been a crucial pillar of Scottish social stability, the damage had probably already long been done before the 2000 enactment.
WP:Thirlage. “People so thirled were called suckeners”…
(It’s about where you’re allowed to have your grain ground.)
So thirlage is (per OED) a “variant or alteration” of thrillage, which is a derivation from thrill, which is a “variant or alteration” of thrall:
(Yes, that’s an ancient entry.)
I was just going to suggest that. Now you say the OED beat me to eat by … its entire existence, probably?
Me: beat me to eat
^bit me to eat, obviously.
I’ve read passages where þrǽll comes through as “peasant who pays land rent in labour” rather than “chattel slave”. I can see how that could develop into a delivery duty like the thirlage.
bit me to eat, obviously
Gave me a good laugh!
>to discharge all rights of irritancy
Disappointing. I’d really love to hold rights of irritancy.
What were the factors that led to their decision that 174-year leases were fine but 175 years was feudal and exploitative? Every reform involves compromise, I suppose.
Scots law is so historically distinct in its development and details from the English law that is ancestral to the varying local laws of the several U.S. states (plus Canada and New Zealand and etc etc) that it has quite a lot of its own jargon words that are completely absent from any of the U.S. dialects of legal jargon, with “irritancy” being a perfectly good example. But what’s striking about them is that they certainly aren’t Gaelic-derived words, or whatever, but generally look like they were coined out of exactly the same Law French lexical/morphological materials as our own older jargon words, yet with different results.
Huh, I didn’t know that. OED, irritancy noun²:
From irritant adjective² ‘Rendering null and void,’ from Latin irritāntem, present participle of irritāre ‘to make void.’ Once again I am made aware of the many gaps in my Latinity.
And DSL. (“Irritancy of the feu occurs when the feuar fails to pay the feu-duty for two consecutive years.”)
Why, oh why, couldn’t it have been “…for a few years”?
For the many, not the feu!
Eddyshaw’s Law ensured I’d never have guessed.
Latin irritus (short -i-) ‘invalid, void, null and void’: