Let us now take another class of words, which will help to explain difficult or corrupt passages in our poets. There is, for instance, the word “bugle” (buculus), meaning an ox (used, as Mr. Wedgwood[229] notices, in Deut. xiv. in the Bible, 1551), which is forgotten even by the peasantry, and only to be seen, as at Lymington and elsewhere, on a few inn-signs, with a picture sometimes of a cow, by way of explanation. I have more than once thought, that when Rosalind, in As You Like It (Act iii., sc. 5), speaks of Phœbe’s “bugle eyeballs,” she means not merely her sparkling eyes, as the notes say, but rather her large, expressive eyes, in the sense in which Homer calls Herê βοῶπις.
To give another illustration of the value of provincialisms in such cases, let us take the word “bumble,” which not only in the New Forest means, in its onomatopoëtic sense, to buzz, hum, or boom, as in the common proverb, “to bumble like a bee in a tar-tub,” and as Chaucer says, in The Wife of Bath’s Tale—
“A bytoure bumbleth in the myre,”
but is also used of people stumbling or halting. Probably, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act iii., sc. 3), in the passage which has been of such difficulty to the commentators, where Mrs. Ford says to the servants, who are carrying Falstaffe in the buck-basket—“Look, how you drumble,” which has no meaning at all, we should, instead, read this word. It, at all events, not only conveys good sense, but is the exact kind of word which the passage seems to expect.
Again, the compound “thiller-horse,” from the Old-English “þill,” a beam or shaft, and so, literally, the shaft-horse, which we find in Shakspeare under the form of “thill-horse” (Merchant of Venice, Act ii., sc. 2), is here commonly used.
Then there are other forms among provincialisms which give such an insight into the formation of language, and show the common mind of the human race. Thus, take the word “three-cunning,”[230] to be heard every day in the Forest, where three has the signification of intensity, just as the Greek τρίς in composition in the compounds τρίσμακαρ, τρισάθλιος, and other forms. So, too, the missel-thrush is called the “bull-thrush,” with the meaning of size attached to the word, as it is more commonly to our own “horse,” and the Greek ἵππος, and the Old-English hrefen, raven, in composition.
As might be expected, from what we have seen of the population of the Forest, the Romance element in its provincialisms is very small. Some few words, such as “merry,” for a cherry; “fogey,” for passionate; “futy,” for foolish; “rue,” for a hedge; “glutch,” to stifle a sob—have crept in, besides such Forest terms as verderer, regarder, agister, agistment, &c., but the majority are Teutonic. Old-English inflexions, too, still remain. Such plurals as placen, housen, peasen, gripen, fuzzen, ashen, and hosen, as we find in Daniel, ch. iii. v. 21; such perfects as crope, from creep; lod, from lead; fotch, from fetch; and such phrases as “thissum” (“þissum”), and “thic” for that, are daily to be heard.
Let us, for instance, take the adjective vinney, evidently from the Old-English finie, signifying, in the first place, mouldy; and, since mould is generally blue or purplish, having gradually attached to it the signification of colour. Thus we find the mouldy cheese not only named “vinney,” but a roan heifer called a “vinney heifer.” The most singular part, however, as exemplifying the changes of words, remains to be told. Since cheese, from its colour, was called “vinney,” the word was applied to some particular cheese, which was mouldier and bluer than others, and the adjective was thus changed into a substantive. And we now have “vinney,” and the tautology, “blue vinney,” as the names of a particular kind of cheese as distinguished from the other local cheeses, known as “ommary” and “rammel.”[231]
So also with the word “charm,” or rather “churm,” signifying, in the first place, noise or disturbance, from the Old-English cyrm. We meet it every day in the common Forest proverb, “Like a swarm of bees all in a churm,” whilst the fowlers on the coast talk also of the wild ducks “being in a churm,” when they are in confusion, flapping their wings before they settle or rise. We find it, too, in the old Wiltshire song of the “Owl’s Mishap,” to be sometimes heard on the northern borders of the Forest:—
“At last a hunted zo ver away,