(Vol. vii., p. 632.)
At the place above referred to, Mr. Keightley puts to me several Queries; but being resident in the country, I had not an opportunity of seeing them till the 15th instant, and it took some days to get the information that would enable me to answer them.
I have now obtained the most ample evidence of the existence, in the latter part of the last, and the beginning of the present, centuries, of the existence of a peculiar body of men called the Fogies, in Edinburgh Castle. My informants agree in describing them as old men, dressed in red coats with apple-green facings, and cocked hats. One says that they fired the Castle guns; another says that he understood them to be the keepers, or, as we might say, the warders of the Castle, and that they were sometimes brought into the town to assist in quelling riots; and this gentleman's recollection of them goes back to 1784 at least. But the oldest date I have been able to get is from a much respected friend, the retired Town Clerk of Edinburgh, who writes to me thus: "I have a most vivid recollection of the Castle Foggies. They were an invalid company, and my recollection of them goes as far back at least as 1780, when I was at Stalker's English school in the Lawnmarket."
To the testimony of these still living witnesses, I have to add that of Dr. Jamieson, who gives the word in his Dictionary as one of common and well-known use in Scotland in his time, 1759-1808; though he may have mistaken in supposing it to be exclusively Scottish. It was for his testimony to this fact that I referred to Dr. Jamieson's Dictionary, and not for his etymology, for I am not so much of a "true Scot" as to consider him infallible in that department. I have not leisure at present to search any farther for the word in books, but in the meantime I presume to think the evidence I have procured of its use in Scotland, will carry us nearly as far back as Mr. Keightley's for its use in Ireland.
I cannot pretend to much acquaintance with the Swedish language, but I was quite well aware that that "is what is meant by the mysterious Su.-G." I was also aware that in the kindred Teutonic tongues the word runs through the various forms of vogt, fogat, phogat, voget, voogd, fogde, foged, fogeti, with the meaning of bailiff, steward, preses, watchman, guard or protector, tutor, overseer, judge, mayor, policeman; and I doubt not that fogie belongs to the same family, though it has lost its tail. Mr. Keightley does not need to be told that words frequently degenerate in meaning, falling from the noblest to the basest, from the purest to the most obscene. Is there then anything improbable in supposing that a word once applied to the governor or chief keeper of a castle, came at last to be applied to all, even the meanest, of his subordinates? Dr. Jamieson asserts that the word fogde in the Su.-G. has actually had that fate; can Mr. Keightley controvert him?
As a proof, quantum valeat, that the Castle fogies were so called for some other reason than merely because of their being "old folks," I may mention that there was in Edinburgh, for more than a century, another body of veterans, called the Town Guard, or City Guard, maintained by the magistrates as a sort of military police, or gendarmerie, and finally disbanded in 1817. This corps was generally recruited from old soldiers; and during the period of my acquaintance with them (9½ years) they were all aged, and some of them very old men; yet I never heard the word fogies applied to them. On the contrary, they were always distinguished from the fogies by the elegant appellation of the "Toon Rottens," or Town Rats, as well as by their facings, which were dark blue. Some, indeed, of my younger friends, who remember the "Rats" very well, say they never heard of the "Fogies" at all; only one of them, who lived when a boy at the Castle Hill, perhaps about forty years ago, recollects of the word "fogie" as being then applied to the soldiers of the ordinary veteran or garrison battalions, with blue facings, that had superseded the fogies in the keeping of the Castle; but of the veritable apple-green fogies of the older establishment, he has no remembrance. As my own recollections of Edinburgh go back to 1808, the fogies, I presume, must have been by that time extinct, for I never saw any of them, though I frequently heard them spoken of by those who had seen them.
I may mention also that while "fogie" was in use, and of well understood application in Scotland, the phrase "old folks," or, to write it according to our vernacular pronunciation, "auld fo'k," was also, and continues to be, in general and familiar use; but nobody in Scotland, I dare say, ever imagined that "the auld fo'k" of his ordinary acquaintance were just "old fogies," or had anything whatever to do with that peculiar class of men, properly so called, the keepers of the royal castles. It is most remarkable, also, that while the corrupt derivative, as Mr. Keightley says "old fogie" is, has been almost quite forgotten among us, having disappeared with the men that bore the name of fogies, the parent form, as he would have "old folks" or "auld fo'k" to be, should remain in full vigour and common use, as part of our living speech. In a word, from all I can learn it would appear that the word "fogie," in its most general acceptation, means by itself, without the "old," an old soldier; and that "old fogie" is only a tautological form, arising from ignorance of its meaning. Be its origin, however, what it may, I have no hesitation now in expressing my conviction that Mr. Keightley's etymology of the word is utterly groundless.
J. L.
City Chambers, Edinburgh.