Cotgrave explains a ‘loricard’ to mean a luske, lowt, or lorell. This luske, from the old French lasque, or lache—slothful—though now wholly obsolete, did much duty formerly. The adjective luskish and the substantive luskishness are often found. In law lache still survives as a term for culpable remissness. Our ‘Laches,’ ‘Lashes,’ ‘Laskies,’ and ‘Lusks,’ I am afraid, therefore, come of but an indifferent ancestry. Nor can anything better be said of our ‘Paillards’ or ‘Pallards.’ We still talk of a ‘pallet,’ the old ‘paillet,’ or straw bed, from ‘paille,’ chaff. A paillard was a cant term for a lie-a-bed.
By ‘ribaldry’ we always mean that which is foul-mouthed in expression. This was ever its implication. A ‘ribaud,’ or ‘ribaut’ belonged to the very scum of society. He was a man who hung on to the skirts of the nobility by doing all their more infamous work for them. Chaucer, wishing to comprise in one sentence the highest and the lowest grades of society, speaks in his ‘Romance’ of ‘king, knighte, or ribaude.’ ‘William le Ribote,’ therefore, mentioned in the ‘Chapter House Records of Westminster,’ or ‘William Ribaud’ (W. 15), could not have borne the best of characters, I am afraid. Although not quite so degraded in the world’s esteem as some of these last, we may here include our ‘Gedlings,’ reminiscences of the old ‘Gadling’ or ‘Gedling,’ one who gadded about from door to door to talk the gossip and scandal—the modern tattler, in fact. Our former ‘Gerard le Gaburs’ and ‘Stephen le Gabbers’ were equally talkative, if not such ramblers. As overmuch talking and jesting always beget a suspicion of overstretching the truth, so was it here. Wicklyffe uses ‘gabbing’ in the sense of lying, and an old poem says:—
Alle those false chapmen
The fiend them will habbe,
Bakeres and breowares
For alle men they gabbe.[[549]]
(A litel soth Sermun.)
In the North of England, I need scarcely add, this is the ordinary and colloquial sense of the term to the present day. The name of ‘John Totiller’ might well-nigh induce us to believe that teetotalism was not unknown by that name at this period, but it is not so. A ‘totiller’ was a ‘whisperer’ of secrets. In the ‘Legend of Good Women,’ one says to the God of Love—
In ye court is many a losengeour
And many a queinte totoler accusour.