A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

The watchful hero felt the knocks, and found

The tossing vessel sailed on shoaly ground.

Sure of his pilot’s loss, he takes himself

The helm, and steers aloof, and shuns the shelf.

Dryden, Virgil’s Æneid, b. v.

Shrew. There are at the present no ‘shrews’ save female ones; but the word, like so many others which we have met with, now restrained to one sex, was formerly applied to both. It conveyed also of old a much deeper moral reprobation than now or in the Middle English it did. Thus Lucifer is a ‘shrew’ in Piers Plowman, and two murderers are ‘shrews’ in the quotation from Chaucer which follows.

And thus accorded ben these schrewes twayn

To sle the thridde, as ye han herd me sayn.

Chaucer, The Pardoneres Tale.

If Y schal schewe me innocent, He schal preve me a schrewe [pravum me comprobabit, Vulg.].—Job ix. 20. Wiclif.