Following a great recent post about plant names from Language Hat, I’ve been looking at a favourite book of mine, Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora.
You could pick virtually any plant at random from this compendium, and learn a good deal about the vanished world our ancestors lived in. Here, for instance, are just some of the local names given to the plant commonly known as Birdsfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus):
“boxing gloves, butter-and-eggs, cat’s claw, cuckoo’s stockings, dead man’s fingers, five fingers, God-Almighty’s-thumb-and-finger, hop-o’-my-thumb, Jack Jump-about, lady’s pincushion, pig’s pettitoes, shoe-and-sock, Tom Thumb…”
Many of the names, as so often, are a kind of preventative magic, to ward off or pay due respect to the evil spirit thought to be associated with the plant, probably because of its seedpods, that look like black claws. We may think of Tom Thumb as an impish little sprite, mischievous at worst, but before he became a fairy-tale, he’d been a member of a much more sinister class of being. Grigson turns to another list, taken from Reginald Scot’s dire tome of 1548, The Discoverie of Witchcraft:
“In our childhood, our mother’s maids have so terrified us with an ugly devil … and have so fraied us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, fauns, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaures, dwarfess, giants, imps, calcars, conjourors, nymphs, changelings, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the firedrake, the puckle, Tom Thumbe, hob goblin, Tom tumbler boneless and other such bugs, that we are afraid of our own shadowes…”
This formless troupe of bugbears is splendidly terrifying, “Tom tumbler boneless” particularly so…
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