FREEDOM AND ENFRANCHISEMENT spring from a Neolithic tribal concept embodied in the root word fri. It means to love, but unlike lubh, a word that has survived unchanged for thousands of years, fri signifies loyalty and family affection rather than erotic desire.
Originally, fri was pri, but all its English derivatives begin with an ‘f’. Only in Sanskrit does the ‘p’ survive – priyas is ‘beloved’.
In prehistoric times, the ties between friends and extended family were essential to tribal survival. In the modern era, the society is much broader, a family of millions instead of dozens – but we rely on the same values to keep us free.
Friends did not own each other; they were not each other’s slaves or masters. Their children were freeborn. They had their liberty, and were free to go as they wanted. They did as they liked too, acting from free will, and were liberal or free with their hospitality – all subtly different connotations of freedom.
In more cynical times, the word becomes a prefix of reproach. Sixteenth-century privateers in search of plunder were freebooters. In the argot of Victorian thieves, to free something was to grab it – freeing a cat was stealing a lady’s hand muff. In 1940s Hollywood, freeloaders took advantage of the free food and drink at studio parties: they were after freebies. Eighteenth-century freeholders, on the other hand, were men of independent means: the word was tavern slang for a drinker wealthy enough to bring his wife out on a spree.
During the Second World War, the Free French, led by General Charles de Gaulle, held out against the Nazis. But the term is tautologous: the Free French defended France, and France was the Frankish kingdom, and the Franks, meaning allies, were the Germanic tribes that conquered Gaul in the sixth century, wielding battle-axes called franciscs. Thirteen hundred years later, during the Franco-Prussian wars in the 1870s, axes were out and rifles were the weapon of choice: unofficial military clubs of sharpshooters or francs-tireurs, wearing no uniforms, harried the Germans, and were executed if captured by the enemy.
During the Crusades, in the twelfth century, the Muslim world regarded any Westerner as basically French. The Arabs called Europeans Frank-ji, the Frankish people, and that survives in Hindu as feringhee, a contemptuous term for foreigners. But foreign is not a derivation of feringhee: it comes from the Latin foras, meaning out-of-doors.
The name Francis was made popular by the thirteenth-century saint who preached to his friends the birds; these days, in an oddly circular bit of semantics, anyone called Francis is nicknamed Frank.
Frank means free and open; it also means the mark on an envelope that allows it to be sent free of charge, or the stamp on a passport that lets the bearer travel freely. Originally, in the early eighteenth century, it meant the signature of some official personage with the power to send letters post-free.
In Saxon times, the frilingi (or freelings) were the second tier of people (the edhilingi were the aristocratic class, and the lazzi were the underclass who avoided work when they could – hence lazy). In medieval England, a franklin was a freeman, a landowner ranking just below the gentry in social status. When the vote was extended to this class, they were enfranchised. Today, the word franchise usually refers to a shop trading under the logo of a global brand, but originally it meant freedom – either from servitude, arrest or a specific law or tax.
Freyja and her brother Freyr were the most benign of Norse gods. He was the bringer of sun and rain, the lord of fertile crops and of the harvest. She was the goddess of love and marriage, and also of the dead; she had the gift of precognition, able to foresee the future without the power to change it. She travelled in a carriage drawn by a pair of cats. Viking weddings were traditionally held on her day of the week – Freyja’s day, which became Friday. That might be why, in the children’s rhyme, ‘Friday’s child is loving and giving’.
The heart of democracy is not the universal franchise, or freedom of speech – it’s dress-down Friday. Any country civilised enough to let its office workers wear jeans and open-necked shirts at the end of the week has evidently evolved beyond feudalism and tyranny.