Hunting using trained birds of prey is believed to have originated in Asia more than 3,000 years ago before spreading across Europe to reach Britain sometime before the eighth to ninth century. Given this lengthy history, unsurprisingly falconry has developed a rich vocabulary all of its own – a passenger, for instance, is a young hawk caught in the wild and trained; a beaching is an old word for a small morsel of meat given to a bird to whet its appetite; and, in falconry terms, to look eager means to look hungry or keen to feed. Similarly, the phrases under the thumb and tied around one’s finger both originally referred to the holding of a hawk’s tether in the hand so that it cannot escape; to be in a bate or at the bate, meaning ‘fighting’ or ‘panicking’, refers to a frightened or impatient hawk ‘bating’ its wings in an attempt to escape its perch; and to be fed up originally referred to a bird that had eaten its fill. Ten more words that began as falconers’ terms before coming to be used more generally in the language are listed here.
Both allure and lure derive from a thirteenth-century English word, lure or leure, for a piece of falconer’s equipment comprising a mass of feathers or fur at the end of a long length of rope. In training the birds, falconers would customarily attach a small piece of meat to the feathered end of the lure, and once this association was learnt the promise of food would eventually be used to entice the hawks back to their owners. Originally derived from French, use of the word lure in English has since developed to come to mean simply an ‘enticement’ or ‘attraction’, whilst allure gained its initial letter from the French phrase à lurer, literally meaning ‘to the lure’.
The English colloquialism codger, used to describe a wizened or decrepit old man, dates from the mid-eighteenth century. Although its exact history is unclear, one suggestion claims that the word developed from a considerably older term, cadger, which first appeared in English in the sixteenth century as another name for an itinerant salesman or local supplier of food and other produce. Later used to describe a peddler or street-dealer, and eventually an old beggar (from where codger presumably derives), the word cadger itself literally means ‘carrier’, and is probably descended from an old falconer’s term for a wooden frame or support, known as the cadge, that would have been carried by a member of a hunting party and used as a portable perch for hawks.
Derived originally from French, the adjective haggard dates from the 1560s in English when it was initially used to describe an adult hawk or owl (in particular a female) that had been captured from the wild as an adult before being trained by a falconer. Figurative use of the term to describe anything or anyone equally wild or untamed developed shortly afterwards, with the eventual progression to the modern meaning of ‘worn-down’ or ‘fatigued’ first recorded in the early seventeenth century.
Often encountered today in the addresses and names of rows of houses or cottages, the old word mews formerly described a row of stables or outbuildings, the term first being used for the royal stables once found at Charing Cross in central London. Dating from the turn of the fourteenth to fifteenth century, these original mews in turn took their name from the even earlier falconers’ mews which once stood on the same site – derived from the French phrase en mue, a mew was originally a small cage or enclosure used in falconry, in which a bird was placed during moulting.
On its first appearance in the English language in the fourteenth century, the word musket was originally used as a name for the male sparrowhawk. In this sense, the term is presumably based on an Old French word for a fly, musche, with the addition of the suffix -et (used to form diminutives, as in maisonette and kitchenette) presumably alluding to the fact that the male sparrowhawk is much smaller than the female. Quite how the bird’s name came to be used as that for a type of firearm is unclear, but it seems apparent that by the sixteenth century musket had come to be used as another name for the bolt fired from a crossbow – perhaps intended to imply some sense of the speed or accuracy of a hunting hawk, the word’s eventual association with weaponry seems to have stemmed from there.
Used since the early sixteenth century in English as another name for a mean-spirited coward or contemptible fool, poltroon was also once used in falconry to describe a bird whose talons had been clipped or removed to prevent it from damaging its catch too badly. The word is descended, via French and Italian, from the Latin word for a young animal, pullus, from which the verb pullulate, meaning to ‘birth’ or ‘bring forth’, is similarly derived. Its use in falconry, however, is thought to be descended from a Latin phrase, pollice truncus, literally meaning ‘maimed in the thumb’, which was originally used of soldiers who shirked military service by deliberately injuring themselves.
Use of the verb pounce to mean to ‘seize upon’ or to ‘ambush’ dates from the mid-seventeenth century in English, and originally described the action of a bird of prey swooping down upon and catching something in its talons, a sense developed from an earlier and now obsolete use of the word to describe the innermost claw of a falcon. More recent figurative senses of the word meaning to ‘spring into action’ or ‘notice suddenly’ were both first recorded in the mid-1800s.
Use of the word pride to mean the ‘best’ or ‘highest’ of something – the sense employed when something is described as being the pride of – dates from the mid-fifteenth century and is a direct development from the Old English-origin adjective proud. Saying that something is in pride of place, however, is a Shakespearean coinage referring to the highest point in the flight of a hunting bird of prey, from where it swoops down on to its target. The phrase is first attested in English in Macbeth (II. iv), in which Shakespeare describes ‘a falcon towering in her pride of place’.
Thought to have been adopted into the language from French, the word rouse was first recorded in English in the late fifteenth century, when it was initially used as a falconer’s term for a bird shaking or fluffing up its feathers. Later used in hunting to apply to the action of scaring game birds from the undergrowth, extended use of the word to mean ‘provoke’ or ‘disturb’ dates from the mid-1500s in the language, with the derivative arouse, meaning to ‘stir from sleep’ or ‘awaken’, first attested in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (IV. i).
Used to describe a coward or deserter, or else someone who goes back on their principles, the word turn-tail derives from the old phrase to ‘turn tail’ meaning to ‘abandon’ or ‘defy’, which was originally used to describe falcons and other birds that would be said to ‘turn tail’ when fleeing from danger. Use of the word as a verb in this sense was first recorded in English in late sixteenth century, with the noun turn-tail developing in the early 1600s.