This is a rather lovely web-site, there are a number of different maps (or layers) which can be overlaid on a modern map of London. There is now a map of medieval London available, as well as a World War Two bomb map, Tudor London and a map before and after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The web-site is at https://www.layersoflondon.org/ and it’s free of charge.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Land Lopers or Land Lubbers
There appears to have been something of a change in the meaning of Land Lubbers (or Landlubbers) since Grose wrote his dictionary. He defined these terms as “vagabonds lurking about the country who subsist by pilfering”. The word comes from the Dutch ‘landloper’, or land-runner and this evolved into meaning a vagrant. But, there’s a separate evolution of the term here as ‘lubber’ meant a foolish person in Middle English, which then became known as a term for a seaman, without the word ‘land’ before it. Gradually though, the two terms merged in meaning and now the common word is ‘landlubber’.
Land lopers wasn’t common enough to appear in Google Ngram, but this shows how the usage of “land lubber” and “landlubber” has changed over the last two centuries.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Lamb’s Wool
Grose is back to his alcoholic recipes again with this definition, which he noted was “apples roasted and put into strong ale”. The phrase first appeared in writing in the sixteenth century, although this was something likely done for many centuries before that.
The origins of the word aren’t known, although some speculate that it’s from ‘La Maes Abhal’, from the festival of the Day of the Apple Fruit. I suspect it’s just named after the appearance of the drink, which had a frothy top, given that whole eggs were often added and whipped in with the drink. Actually, I’m not sure what the eggs were doing in this drink, just the apples put in strong ale seems enough to me, but there we go….
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Knock Me Down
There’s not much that I can add to this, but it’s a bit of social history recorded by Grose, being defined as “strong ale or beer, stingo”. I’ve had imperial stouts that should be called this….. A stingo is a strong ale, a word not really used much at all now, although Sam Smiths have a beer called stingo. The phrase was used in the middle of the eighteenth century and more commonly in the nineteenth century, before being mostly lost in the twentieth century. There is though one brewery, Zerodegrees in London, who still have a porter with this name.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Knight and Barrow Pig
This is another beautiful phrase, defined by Grose as “more hog than gentleman. A saying of any low pretender to precedence”. A barrow pig is one which has been castrated and so the meaning of the phrase becomes quite self-evident, but it’s perhaps unfortunate that it didn’t seem to be widely used and it’s really only through Grose that it has been recorded. It would be quite a sophisticated insult to use today though…..
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Knight of the Post
This is defined by Grose as “a false evidence, one that is ready to swear any thing for hire”. So, effectively, someone who is willing to perjure themselves for money, which isn’t an ideal state of affairs for the judicial system. The phrase dates back to the late sixteenth century, although had fallen out of usage by the middle of the nineteenth century. In England and Wales, perjury only became an offence in common law in 1613, following a series of rather unfortunate cases.
Back in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and indeed later, it was possible to find people around the Inns of Court and Westminster Hall who were willing to lie and produce false documents for a suitable fee. The origins of the term are unknown, but it’s thought it likely relates to where the individual would stand, by a certain post where legal announcements were placed, waiting for their next commission.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Kissing Crust
Sometimes Grose gets a bit obsessed with murder, crime and fornication, but with this definition it’s more playful, it’s “the part where the loaves have touched the oven”. There’s some debate, and there are probably more important things to talk about, about whether this is correct, as others have defined it as “the part where the loaves have touched each other”. This sort of makes a difference, at in Grose’s definition it would be a hard bit of bread, whereas with the second definition, it would be a soft piece of the bread.
I don’t think I’ll over-worry about who is correct (although I’m not sure it’s Grose), but it’s a quite warming little term and a few bakeries around the world have used it as their name.
Well, you learn something new every day…. I’m not sure how useful this knowledge is in my day to day life though.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Kingdom Come
Another cheery little definition from Grose, he defines this as “he is gone to kingdom come, he is dead”. It’s better known now as a computer game franchise and also as a phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, although there it’s a reference to the Kingdom of God that will come in the future. This future state of glory is also relevant to the meaning of the phrase, it just means the next phase and in human terms that means being dead.
The phrase had fallen out of favour, but its new meaning has seen a recent rise in usage.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….
Kill Care Club
This is defined by Grose as “the members of this club, styled also the Sons of Sound Sense and Satisfaction, met at their fortress, the Castle Tavern, in Paternoster Row”. There’s some good timing with my working through the dictionary as, by chance, I walked through Paternoster Square today in London, which is the remnants of what was a badly damaged area during the Second World War.
Paternoster Row was until the Second World War a home of book publishing, with millions of books destroyed during the Blitz. The Castle Tavern had long since closed by then, but it was located on the north side of Paternoster Row, between Eagle and Child Court and Lovels Alley. As for the club, I have no idea, it’s something that Grose must have been intrigued by and there’s little else that has been written about them.
