Our English glossaries afford but little information on the subject. Minshew refers the reader from gimmal to gemow; the former he derives from “gemellus,” the latter from the French “jumeau:” and he explains the gemow ring to signify “double or twinnes, because they be rings with two or more links.” Neither of the words is in Junius. Skinner and Ainsworth deduce gimmal from the same Latin origin, and suppose it to be used only of something consisting of correspondent parts, or double. Dr. Johnson gives it a more extensive signification; he explains gimmal to mean, “some little quaint devices, or pieces of machinery,” and refers to Hanmer: but he inclines to think the name gradually corrupted from geometry or geometrical, because, says he, “any thing done by occult means is vulgarly said to be done by geometry.”
The word is not in Chaucer, nor in Spenser; yet both Blount in his “Glossography,” and Philips in his “World of Words,” have geminals; which they interpret twins.
Shakspeare has gimmal in two or three places; though none of the commentators seem thoroughly to understand the term.
Gimmal occurs in “King Henry the Fifth,” Act IV. Scene II., where the French lords are proudly scoffing at the condition of the English army. Grandpree says,
“The horsemen sit like fixed candlesticks,
With torch-staves in their hands; and their poor jades
Lob down their heads, dropping the hide and hips:
The gum down-roping from their pale dead eyes;
And in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit
Lies foul with chaw’d grass, still and motionless.”
We may understand the gimmal bit, therefore, to mean either a double bit, in the ordinary sense of the word (duplex,) or, which is more appropriate, a bit composed of links, playing one within another, (gemellus.)
In the “First Part of King Henry the Sixth,” after the French had been beaten back with great loss, Charles and his lords are concerting together the farther measures to be pursued, and the king says,
“Let’s leave this town, for they are hare brain’d slaves,
And hunger will enforce them to be more eager:
Of old I know them; rather with their teeth
The walls they’ll tear down, than forsake the siege.”
To which Reignier subjoins,
“I think, by some odd gimmals or device,
Their arms are set, like clocks, still to strike on;
Else they could ne’er hold out so, as they do,
By my consent we’ll e’en let them alone.”