DERIVATION OF "LAD" AND "LASS."
The derivation of the word lad has not yet been given, so far as I am aware; and the word lass is in the same predicament. Lad is undoubtedly of old usage in England, and in its archaic sense it has reference, not to age, as now, but to service or dependence; being applied, not to signify a youth or a boy, but a servant or inferior.
In Pinkerton's Poems from the Maitland MSS. is one, purporting to be the composition of Thomas of Ercildoune, which begins thus:
"When a man is made a kyng of a capped man."
After this line follow others of the same bearing, until we come to these:
"When rycht aut wronge astente togedere,
When laddes weddeth lovedies," &c.
The prophet is not, in these words, inveighing against ill-assorted alliances between young men and old women; but is alluding to a general bouleversement of society, when mésalliances of noble women to ignoble men will take place.
This sense of the word gives us, I think, some help towards tracing its derivation, and I have no doubt that its real parent is the Anglo-Saxon hlafæta,—a word to be found in one instance only, in a corner of Æthelbyrt's Domas: "Gif man ceorles hlafætan of-slæth vi scyllingum gebete."
By the same softening of sound which made lord and lady out of hlaford and hlæfdige, hlafæta became lad, and hlafætstre became lass. As the lord supplied to his dependents the bread which they ate, so each thus derived from the loaf the appellation of their mutual relation, in the plain phraseology of our ancestors.
Dr. Leo, in his interesting commentary on the Rectitudines singularum personarum (edit. Halle, 1842, p. 144.), says:
"Ganz analog dem Verhältnisse von ealdore und gingra ist das Verhältniss von hlaford (brodherrn), hlæfdige (brodherrin), und hlafæta (brodeszer). Hlaford ist am Ende zum Standestitel (lord) geworden; ursprünglich bezeichnet es jeden Gebieter; die Kinder, die Leibeignen, die abhängigen freien Leute, alles was zum Hausstande und zum Gefolge eines Mannes gehört, werden als dessen hlafætan bezeichnet."
Perhaps some of your readers may favour myself and others by giving the derivation of boy and girl.
H. C. C.