Amy Jeffs has a very interesting LRB review (archived) of From Lived Experience to the Written Word, by Pamela H. Smith; it starts with a vivid description of a traditional craftsman:
Fred Saunders’s wheelwright shop in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, stood not far from the forge and next to the paint shop, where his finished waggons were painted in colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the fire until sufficiently expanded, then lifted out with great tongs called tyre-dogs and dropped over the outside of the wheel. Wheel and tyre would then be doused with cold water so that the metal shrank back to its original size, squeezed tightly about the wheel, never to be rattled free by stone or pothole. Fred made haywains, muck-carts and drays, as well as the everyday wooden items required by his neighbours – and their coffins when they died.
But I’m bringing it here for a paragraph that taught me a new word:
The psalter also offers readers an image of a quintessential medieval feast. The manuscript’s patrons, Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes Sutton and his daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, sit with their fellow diners, their hands placed on a long tabletop that rests on decorative, braced trestles (this suggests the top of the table might be lifted off, presumably to make room for dancing). On the facing page is an image of the kitchen, where servants are preparing food and drink, transferring it to dishes and mazers and carrying it across the page gutter to the nobility. Because the kitchen tables are lowly fixtures, and likely to rest on an uneven floor, they are three-legged and simply built: you can see where the top of one leg, the kind rounded off in a lathe or on a shave-horse, pokes through the tabletop.
I hadn’t known mazer, which turns out to be (OED, entry revised 2001) “Maple or other fine-grained hardwood used as a material for making drinking vessels. Obsolete.” or “A bowl, drinking cup, or goblet, usually without a foot, made from a burr or knot of a maple tree and frequently mounted with silver or silver-gilt bands at the lip and base. Also: a similar vessel made of metal or other material. Now archaic and historical.” There’s a nice, detailed etymology:
Probably < Anglo-Norman mazer, mazere, mazre, macere, maser, masre, madre maple (the wood and the tree), mazer, goblet, drinking bowl (end of 12th cent.) and Old French mazre, masdre, madre wood with veined grain used for making vessels, vessel made of this, maple (also end of 12th cent.; Middle French, French madre; compare post-classical Latin mazer, earlier masarus maple wood (9th cent. in a French charter; in various forms in British sources from 13th cent.), drinking vessel (in various forms in British sources from 1300)) < a form in a Germanic language cognate with Middle Dutch māser knot or swelling of a tree, especially a maple, Old Saxon masur swelling (Middle Low German māser curly-grained wood, also glossing post-classical Latin murra maple), Old High German masar knot or swelling of a tree (glossing Latin tuber, nodus; Middle High German maser curly-grained wood, excrescence on the maple and other trees, drinking cup made of curly-grained wood, German Maser curl in grain of wood), Old Icelandic mǫsurr maple tree, veined wood, Swedish masur curly-grained wood (compare masur n.); probably ultimately from the same base are mase n. and measles n.; compare also maple tree n. and discussion at that entry. Compare also Norwegian regional (perhaps archaic) masa to paint with a pattern of flames or with curving stripes, Danish mase veining in wood (probably < Middle Low German).
Notes
The word may have existed already in Old English: Maserfelth, the site of a battle mentioned in Bede (Maserfeld in the Old English translation; doubtfully—but at an early date already—identified with Oswestry in Shropshire), may perhaps show the noun as its first element, and a corrupt form of a derived adjective *mæseren may perhaps be shown by the following (although others suggest instead a connection with maslin n.¹):OE VI mæsene sceala.
Rec. Gifts of Bishop Leofric to Exeter Cathedral (Bodleian MS.) in A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters (1956) 226With this perhaps compare Old Icelandic mǫsurr skál maplewood vessel, found in church inventories.
The statement in N.E.D. (1906) that Welsh masarn, in the sense ‘maple, sycamore’ (1425) is ‘certainly’ a loan < English overstates the case somewhat (it is at least as likely that it was borrowed directly < French), and the existence of a Welsh example from c1300 in this sense cannot therefore be reliably used as the basis for concluding that sense 1b [“The tree yielding this wood; a maple tree”] might have been more common in Middle English than the surviving evidence suggests.
The conclusion of the review is also interesting linguistically:
Smith gives examples of work now being undertaken to reconstruct craft practice using historical books of art, recipes, tip sheets and treatises. She herself, partaking in a revival of interest in craft practice across the humanities, has collaborated with practitioners and museum scholars to explore the life casting techniques described in a late 16th-century collection of texts about the making of art objects. Conducting practical studies from the treatise and accompanying sketches transformed her understanding of the manuscript. Smith came to see it as the written manifestation of the repetitious, tireless, real life experiments of the maker. Her findings and those of the other projects she cites shed light on ‘the dynamics of collaborative practice’, artistic intention – a concept not usually applied to crafters in this period – and on the limitations of the written word in articulating practical knowledge. Her title may seem at first to prioritise language, but in the end her book demonstrates its inadequacy. She admits that we must accept ‘approximating concepts and terms’: ‘skill’, ‘Kunst’, ‘cunning’, ‘working knowledge’ and ‘artisanal epistemology’.
The field of medieval studies offers a few useful terms. One is ‘orthopraxis’ (practice according to a rule or tradition, in the sense of ‘making straight’), thought to have been coined by Raimon Pannikar and used by Paul Gehl and Mary Carruthers in their studies of monasticism. In her book The Craft of Thought (1998), Carruthers writes: ‘Any craft develops an orthopraxis, a craft “knowledge” which is learned, and indeed can only be learned, by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarisation of exemplary masters’ techniques and experience. Most of this knowledge cannot be set down in words; it must be learned by practising, over and over again.’ Binski enlists the classics: ‘When it comes to making something, the matter to hand is always shaped by hard knowledge (‘episteme’, Latin ‘scientia’), talent (‘empeiria’) and method (‘techne’ or ‘ars’).’ The most subtle of these, scientia, he defines as knowledge of the ‘whys’ of method, a more complex form of comprehension than the ‘hows’.
Fred Saunders’s son Graham learned the wheelwright’s trade at a time when tractors and metal trailers were becoming affordable to British farmers. In his lifetime, the forge, wheelwright’s shop and paint shop all closed down. By the time he was middle-aged, Sherborne had become the property of the National Trust. In later life, Graham used his knowledge to work on the waggon collections held by stately homes and museums, like the one at the Old Prison in Northleach. I met him at his stand at Frampton-on-Severn Country Fair a decade ago. Not long afterwards, he showed me how to make the undercarriage (never a chassis) of a traditional waggon, using draw-knives and axes, chisels, saws and froes to make the frame, then scraping the surface to a sheen with shards of broken glass. It was 18-foot-long and fashioned from green oak and poplar, complete with a decoratively chamfered turntable fixed to the front axle. Graham told me that it was smooth enough ‘to ride bareback to Brighton’ – or so his father would have said.
Jeepers! You’ve got your moneysworth with that etym.
You can see what must be the mentioned images of the mazerful kitchen and feast if you go to:
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/08/throwing-a-medieval-feast.html
And scroll down near to the bottom of the text, where you get links to pages from the Luttrell Psalter showing: 1) “a marginal illustration of food and drinks being prepared for a feast” and 2) “an illustration of a feast”.
The text mentions mazers: “The second table is being used to serve drink, presumably wine, from earthenware jugs into shallow bowls, known as mazers.”
Good felloe, too.
I saw that movie Goodfelloes.
I was struck by shave-horse, which (says the linked WP article) is employed in coopering and bowyerage. All these words that have become obscure with the decay of the crafts they were once embedded in!
felloes
Norw. felg “ring of a wheel” suggests Eng. fellow.
Somewhere in the distance, a tyre-dog barked.
I’ve thought of shavehorses often, lately, as I’ve been carving a wooden bowl, and a shavehorse would be a good way to hold it, particularly while using a drawknife*. I don’t think I have space for one, though. There are plenty of videos of this sort of thing on youtube.
*Which I don’t have either, at present, but I’m thinking of getting one. It would make shaping the outside of the bowl a lot easier—provided I had a suitable way of holding it.
Norw. felg “ring of a wheel”
German Felge “wheel rim”
…Old High German masar knot or swelling of a tree (glossing Latin tuber, nodus; Middle High German maser curly-grained wood, excrescence on the maple and other trees…)… probably ultimately from the same base are mase n. and measles n.; compare also maple tree n. and discussion at that entry.
Here is the OED’s etymology for maple tree (from which the simple maple was apparently backformed):
(For the general outline of the development in English, the discussion of the -p- in maple on pages 218–219 of Philip Durkin (2009) The Oxford Guide to Etymology seems clearer to me—and visible, I hope, on Google Books here and here.)
There is much in the OED’s etymology for maple tree that puzzled me, and so I just spent some time looking into the matter. I thought my notes might interest LH readers, so reproduce some of them below, for what they are worth:
1. The entry in Grimm for the German dialectal Apfeldorn ‘field maple (Acer campestre)’ (mentioned in the OED) is here. I couldn’t immediately find any recent discussion of these dialect forms. which surprises me. Note also the bizarre northern variants of Wacholder ‘juniper’ (itself with variant Wachandel) that show an initial m-: Macholder and Machandel (listed here at DWDS, for instance).
2. There are other facts that seem relevant to the etymology of English maple, but are not mentioned in the OED. Vittore Pisani (1972) ‘Contributi all’etimologia germanica: ted. Gift e Farbe’ Studi Germanici n.s. 10, 1 (available here), has the following discussion on page 39, footnote 6:
Kluge’s short but important discussion is here. Ernout–Meillet is here, bottom page 824 and top of page 825. Here is Varro’s text:
3. Latin opulus persisted not only in Italian obbio, lobbio ‘field maple (Acer campestre)’ (with accretion of article) and in Friulian and other regional languages of Italy (there is a nice list on page 147 here), but also in Vegliote as vaplo (see here), with va- from Latin ŏ in a closed syllable (cf. vaclo ‘eye’ from oculus). On the basis of the passage from Varro and the geographic distribution of forms in Romance, opulus has been considered to be of Gaulish, or more broadly, Celtic (Lepontic?) origin.
4. Walde-Hoffman on Latin opulus:
The Greek ἀπελλόν· αἴγειρος cited here is an entry from the lexicon of rare and obscure words compiled by Hesychius. Greek αἴγειρος is ‘black poplar (Populus nigra)’.
5. It has been proposed that the family of French érable ‘maple’ (Franco-Provençal iserâblo (Fribourg ajèrâbyo), Niçard argelabre, etc., etc.) descends from an earlier *acerabulus, appearing in medieval Latin texts in such forms as acterabulus, acerfulus. This was apparently first proposed by Vendryes here, top of page 138. This *acerabulus looks like a blend or univerbation of Latin acer ‘maple’ with another word of a form like *abulus. Some have taken this *abulus to be the Gaulish word for ‘apple’ (similar to the account of given for maple in the OED). Here we can recall Pisoni’s words cited above: ma dalla mela all’acero c’è una bella distanza. Rather, a Celtic or other substrate form kindred to Latin opulus, altered in univerbation?
I don’t immediately see why any people might have likened the apple and the field maple to each other. The field maple is a good source of pollen and nectar for bees in season, and it generally blooms in April in France, like the apple tree—but then, many trees bloom in April.
6. Lastly, there is also a town in the Netherlands called Meppel—wherever its name comes from, although of course it has been compared to English maple.
7. So perhaps OE mapulder, etc., masc.(?), mapuldre, fem., Old Saxon mapulder resulted from a collision of West Germanic *matul-dra- with another Germanic form borrowed from, or kindred to, Latin opulus ‘field maple’, and still represented by German dialect forms like Affolder, etc., ‘field maple (Acer campestre)’, further complicated by interference from the family of English apple, German Apfel, etc.
Maybe more later. It seems like a topic that someone besides Pisani must have treated recently.
(Apologies for any uncaught OCR and tagging errors.)
Strewth @Xerib! Thank you.
Yes, that’s an impressive compilation!
Re Meppel, I think the Drent dialect name Möppelt makes the “maple” interpretation less likely:
De plaatsnaam Meppel is een poging om de oorspronkelijke naam [Möppelt] (Nedersaksische benaming) in het Nederlands om te zetten. De oorspronkelijke naam is afkomstig van de samenvoeging van [Mör] (Nedersaksisch voor modder) en pelt (een doorwaadbare plek in een rivier). [Mörpelt] werd [Möppelt] en uiteindelijk Meppel en heeft dus niets te maken met de Canadese eik (of maple), zoals sommigen beweren.
https://www.betekenis-definitie.nl/Meppel
PlasticPaddy, thanks for looking into this matter. I had seen that account of the name during my research. I wonder if there is a more detailed published source for that? I couldn’t find any appropriate pelt or peld in the Woordenboek van de Drentse dialecten, but I didn’t look elsewhere for this word. I wondered if folk-etymology had been at work, and whether the ö-vowel was due to the flanking labials.
I abandoned all hope when looking at this, the entry for the town name in the Oudnederlands Woordenboek (1998–2008):
I let the whole question slide, since I have don’t have access to Gerald van Berkel and Kees Samplonius (2006) Nederlandse plaatsnamen: herkomst en historie at the moment. And since Meppel is a proper name, it would more likely be illuminated by a proper Germanic etymology for English maple, than provide any light itself.
What a glorious mess!
The extra -n in various German forms is part of Dorn “thorn”, a common suffix in the names of thorny shrubs.
For the -dVr suffix being “ultimately related” to tree, maybe we can blame Kümmel’s law (described in this paper from 3.4 onwards)…
@xerib, dm
There is a niedersächsisches Wörterbuch published by Uni Göttingen. Although I do not have a copy (maybe academics can obtain access to an online version?), I suspect this would be a good place to start (maybe dm or hans etc., knows of a handbook or other resource). I am not qualified to give an opinion as to whether original Meppel was mangled to Möppelt by Groningers or Möppelt was mangled to Meppel by zealous cartographers who detested Groningers or their speech (if the speech, I would have some sympathy for the cartographers). All I can say further is that mangling to add or drop final t strikes me as unusual, I would rather believe the final t in Möppelt is faithful to an original.
This is not the right dialect but shows a possible pelt = “strip”:
—
pelt , pèljt , mannelijk , streep. Op peljt sjtaon: bij het toepen aan het laatste streepje toe zijn; ook wel: “op ermout sjtaon”; aankondigen, dat een of meer spelers aan hun laatste streepje toe zijn.
Bron: Schelberg, P.J.G. (1986), Woordenboek van het Sittards dialect, Amsterdam pelt , pélt , kaartterm , (bij toepen) pélt VB: Es ‘r nog èi sjtriëpke kryt, verlûis ‘r de perty want ‘r sjtèit pélt. ‘r hèt viertien sjtriëpkes.
Bron: Jaspars, G. en H. Fiévez (2006-2008), Woordenboek van het Gronsvelds, Gronsveld/Ryckholt
—
https://ewnd.ivdnt.org/boeken/zoek_woorden [pelt]
Considering the attestation given by the ONW, I was also entertaining the possibility that in the local pronunciation (Möppelt), we had an instance of the common phenomenon of paragogic -t and -d in the languages of the region, as described for example in C.B. van Haeringen (1938) ‘Over z.g. “paragogische” consonanten in het Nederlands’, De Nieuwe Taalgids 32, available in electronic format here.
.
@xerib
In Drent there are a number of placenames in -elte, at least one had a version without the final t:
In 1421 werd de buurtschap [Busselte] vermeld als ten Busschelyn.
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busselte
De plaatsnaam [Wittelt] is een samenstelling van wit (kleur) en holt (hout, bos) of holte, helte, elte, afgeleid van hultitbja = plaats waar hout groeit.
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittelte
Therefore your explanation (or one in which Meppel was assimilated to a name in -elte by analogy) seems reasonable.
Oh that brings to mind: Ob-Ugric (mainly Khanty, just a few cases in Mansi) turns Uralic #paw- ‘tree’ into a tool suffix broadly understood, e.g. *suxə- ‘to row’ → Kh *ɬu-p, Ms *tō-p ‘oar’. This might also kinda work in Germanic sometimes, they’d fit right into the set of all the tool names in -er that are most often either agent nouns or old PIE derivatives in *-tro-, *-dʰro- (occasionally something else yet, viz. hammer). Makes me wonder if there are any actual known cases of that development?
Oh, fascinating. That seems to answer a bunch of questions I had about German. I’ll have to read it at leasure sometime.
The University of Groningen has various dictionaries of Gronings searchable here (pull down the choices under “Kies woordenboeken” and select all) and also here. I couldn’t find a semantically suitable pelt or peld there, either.