In the countryside many farming practices and rural crafts had particular vocabularies and modes of expression associated with them. In the 1660s the agricultural writer John Worlidge described the bewildering variety of names for tools, livestock, and techniques existing between husbandmen in different parts of the country. There was amongst them such a Babel of confusion as well in their terms and names of things, as there is in the practice of the art of agriculture itself, that remove a husbandman but sixty, or an hundred miles from the place where he hath constantly exercised his husbandry, to another, and he shall not onely admire their method and order in tilling the land, but also their strange and uncouth language and terms, by which they name their several utensils, instruments or materials they use.
Thus the countrymen whom Sir Anthony Fitzherbert knew in Derbyshire in the early sixteenth century had various languages all of their own. Ploughmen would tell that the oxen's harness was made up of a number of constituent parts such as the 'stylkynges', the 'wrethynge-temes', and the 'bowes'. This was then attached to the 'togwith', or part of the draught apparatus of the harrow, which, in turn, was linked to the 'swingle tree' or 'sharbeare', a wooden frame to which the 'share' of the plough was fixed. Holding firmly to the 'plough-style' (right-hand handle) the husbandman could then take his 'landes' ( part of the ploughing gear) and make his 'raines' (furrows) and 'rest balkes' (ridges) on his 'hades' (strips at end of arable land). Meanwhile, the farriers had an equally specialized vocabulary to describe the anatomy and equipment of horses. The horse's fundament, for example, was known as its 'tuell': the genitals were called 'scote' in the case of a colt and 'shap' in that of a mare. There were innumerable names for the various diseases afflicting horses, of which 'morfounde', 'farcyon', 'affreyd', 'rynbone', and 'myllettes' represent only a small sample. If a swelling was on the animal's back it was a 'nauylgall'; if above its fetlock, a 'wind-gall'; if under its ear, a 'vives'.
Meanwhile the arable farmers of East Anglia would talk in terms of their 'brank' (buckwheat) and their 'bullimonge' (mixture of oats and barley), their 'hawme' (straw) and their 'edish' (stubble). They would speak of 'casting' (cleaning) their grain, of 'dew-retting' (steeping) their flax, and 'feying' (cleaning) their ditches. Around their farms one would meet a 'tilman' (ploughman) and a 'neathered' (cowherd), together with a 'patch' (labourer) and a 'droie' (servant). Among their instruments, or 'pelfe', could be found a 'crotch' (weeding tool), a 'didall' (triangular ditching spade) and a 'doong crone' (crook); in their fields might be seen some 'dallops' (tufts of corn) and some 'compas' (manure), while the 'swatches' (rows) of 'drink corn' (barley) were waiting to be bundled up in 'coemes' (four bushels).
A different set of vocabulary, again, was known to the shepherds up in the pastoral country of the East Riding. They had different words to describe sheep according to sex, age, and condition. Thus a 'gimmer' was a young female only once shorn; a 'hogge' was a youngster for weaning before first shearing; a 'waster' was a sheep that would not fatten; and a 'moone rider' was a barren ewe. Rams could be 'hunge tuppes', 'close tuppes', 'riggon tuppes', or 'dodded tuppes': once castrated, or 'libbed', they were called 'weathers'. At the same time, various names described parts of the sheep's anatomy: its 'claggs', 'hough', 'kell', and 'liske'. Shepherds designated ownership of a sheep by making a 'botte' (mark) on the fleece or else by 'stowinge' it (cutting off the tip of its ear). They would count them by into the 'creave' (small pen) by making 'fagget-markes' (a sign for five) on a 'nickstick'. A lamb's testicles, or 'stones', could be fried with parsley as a delicacy called 'anchitricoes', while the sheepskins, or 'pelts', could be made into 'pellitt moyles' (sheepskin slippers).
The differences between other occupational dialects are vividly illustrated by a legal dispute at Middlewich, Cheshire, in May 1599 which revolved around the meaning of the word 'stole', or 'scole'. Charles and James Mainwaring had agreed to supply timber to Philip Oldfield and others from trees chopped at Compton Lea in Middlewich, with the condition that the order include no wood from smaller saplings or 'stoles'. When their customers claimed that the Mainwarings had failed to meet this condition, the definition of what exactly constituted a stole became important. On the one hand, Charles Mainwaring, who 'cannot wryte or reade wrytten hannd', stated that 'hee thinketh in his consciens, that all trees aboue the length of three yeards are reputed and taken to bee trees, and all of three yeards or under to be called stoles and are not trees'. On the other hand, the plaintiffs understood a stole rather differently than this. When they sent for John Ameson to draw up their indictment, he 'asked them what a stole was' to which 'they answered that a stole was such a one as a man standinge at the roote of ytt might reach the toppe of the bodie with his hannd'. The court then took evidence from two carpenters, William Prestbury and Richard Hulme, but found that to them it meant the stump of a fallen oak tree. The former 'saith that is commonly called a stowle or stoole of an oak tree whiche remaynethe after that the oke ys fallen or cutt downe, and so he hath knowen and reputed the same to be by the space of thirty yeres or more thereabouts, by reason so longe tyme he hath used the craft or occupation of a carpenter'. Moreover, among them, 'those of trees which be in length one, two or three yards or thereabouts and beane cropps are comonly called stubbs and stubb trees, and not stoles'.
Another cluster of occupational groups renowned for their peculiar language were miners. The lead miners of Derbyshire and the Mendips, the tinners of Cornwall, the silver miners of Cardiganshire, and the iron ore and coal miners of Staffordshire, are all recorded as having their own unique and bewildering terminology known only to themselves and completely opaque to outsiders. These dialects contributed significantly to the widespread contemporary perception of all subterranean workers as some kind of heathen race apart. In the mid-eighteenth century the colliers of Kingswood Forest, near Bristol, were said to be 'so barbarous and savage' that 'it was dangerous to go among them, and their dialect was the roughest and rudest in the nation'. In fact, these distinctive linguistic systems were no more than signifiers of particular work communities, each with their own practices, customs, and norms.
In the mid-seventeenth century Edward Manlove, a former steward of the barmote court for the lead mines in the wapentake of Wirksworth, Derbyshire, collected some of the 'strange and uncouth' terms used by the local miners in the form of a verse:
Bunnings, polings, stemples, forks, and slyder,
Stoprice, yokings, soletrees, roach, and ryder,
Water holes, wind holes, veyns, coe-shafts and woughs,
Main rakes, cross rakes, brown-henns, budles and soughs,
Break-offs, and buckers, randam of the rake,
Freeing, and chasing of the stole to th' stake,
Starting of oar, smilting, and driving drifts,
Primgaps, roof works, flat-works, pipe-works, shifts,
Cauke, sparr, lid-stones, twitches, daulings, and pees,
Fell, bous, and knock-barke, forstid-oar, and tees,
Bing-place, barmoot court, barghmaster, and stowes,
Crosses, holes, hange-benches, turntree, and coes,
Founder-meers, taker-meers, lot, cope, and sumps,
Stickings, and stringes of oar, wash-oar and pumps,
Corfes, clivies, deads, meers, groves, rake-soil, the gange,
Binge-oar, a spindle, a lampturn, a fange,
Fleaks, knockings, coestid, trunks and sparks of oar,
Sole of the rake, smytham, and many more.
As one commentator put it, the miners' vocabulary could 'not bee understood without interpretor of theire owne expression'. It was for this reason that Thomas Houghton needed to include a glossary of forty-three 'terms of art' used by the Derbyshire lead miners in the edition of their laws and customs which he printed in 1681. Defoe actually required a translator when he came across one of their number in the early eighteenth century. This 'most uncouth spectacle' had 'some tools in a little basket which he drew up with him, not one of the names of which we could understand but by the help of an interpreter. Nor indeed could we understand any of the man's discourse so as to make out a whole sentence; and yet the man was pretty free of his tongue too . . . We asked him, how deep the mine lay which he came out of: he answered us in terms we did not understand; but our interpreter, as above, told us, it signified that he was at work 60 fathoms deep . . .'.
Seamen were another group renowned for having their own particular dialect. Elizabethan sailors clearly had a variety of words to describe the many different types of seafaring vessel and to denote their constituent parts. They also had a huge range of terms to denote the equipment on board and a special array of verbs to describe its use. In 1635 Sir William Brereton noted down twenty-four of the peculiar 'names and terms which mariners use' as he had heard them on the voyage home from Holland. Sir Henry Manwayring thought it damaging to the national interest that gentlemen such as Brereton were completely baffled by the language of the sea. In 1644 he published The Sea-mans Dictionary in an effort to explain some of it, since 'the vulgar sort of sea-men hate land-men so much' they are 'unwilling to instruct them in that art'. Soon afterwards John Smith contributed The Sea-Mans Grammar, a nautical manual which included 'plain exposition of all such terms as are used in the navie and fight at sea'.
Such tracts proved invaluable to an Admiralty official such as Samuel Pepys who had to deal with sailors and shipwrights all the time. He read one of them in March 1661 and later had them both bound up together. Many people, however, seem to have reciprocated the seamen's distrust of 'land-men' and regarded them, like miners, as a distinct and dangerous fraternity with 'a dialect and manner peculiar to themselves'. At the end of the seventeenth century Ned Ward looked with disgust on the sailors come ashore in London, such 'uncouth animals' in their habits, so 'rude in their behaviour'. He came across a group of carousers in a 'tavern kitchen' by the Exchange and 'soon found by their dialect they were masters of ships'.
'Cheer up, my lads, pull away, save tide; come, boys'. Then handling the quart, being empty, ' What, is she light? You, sir, that's next, haul the bar-line, and call the cooper's mate'. The drawer being come, 'Here, you fly-blown swab, take away this damned tankard, and ballast her well. Pox take her, there's no stowage in her hold. Have you ne'er a larger vessel?'
It is not surprising, perhaps, that sailors tended to keep to themselves, living with their families in discrete districts within port towns, usually by the docks, which formed highly localized speech communities. Any visitor to London's seafaring neighbourhoods of Rotherhithe and Wapping, it was said in the mid-eighteenth century, 'would be apt to suspect himself in another country'. Even at Poole in Dorset it was later reported that a small part of the town 'appears to be inhabited by a peculiar race of people, who are, and probably long have been, the fishing population of their neighbourhood. Their manner of speaking is totally different from that of the neighbouring rustics.'
In the case of all these vocabularies of work and craft, however, what was impenetrable and sometimes threatening to outsiders, was an important facet of occupational solidarity and craft identity to their users. Part of learning any trade was to be initiated into its unique linguistic system, to be apprenticed in its terms of art and specialized nomenclature no less than in its skills and techniques. A powerful sense of belonging could accrue from the language of work no less than from the language of place and as with all professional jargon there could be a vested interest in excluding the unschooled. This is no more explicitly illustrated than in the most famous of all the argots of this period and beyond, that of the 'criminal underworld'. A swathe of pamphlets appeared from the mid-sixteenth century detailing the 'canting tongue' of the 'fraternity of vagabonds', pick-pockets and prostitutes who were said to inhabit London streets and tramp the country. By the early seventeenth century this speech was beginning to be represented on the stage and it was dignified with the first of its 'dictionaries' in 1673 when Richard Head published The Canting Academy.
The cant of the 'criminal underworld' demonstrates the way in which language can both express and create group identities and even subcultures. The jargon of con-artists and cutpurses enshrined their methods and described their familiar objects no less than many other occupational dialects and perhaps more than most it provided a defence and protective from outside encroachment. It was invented, as one observer appreciated, 'to th' intent that (albeit any spies should secretly steale into their companies to discouer them) they might freely vtter their mindes one to another, yet auoide the danger'. Thomas Harman, author of one of the earliest pamphlets on the subject, offered this example of their conversation. What stowe you bene cose and cut benat whydds and byng we to rome vyle to nyp a bong so shall we haue lowre for the bousing ken and when we byng back to the deuseauyel we wyll fylche some duddes of the ruffemans or myll the ken for a lagge of dudes. The translation of which was: What holde your peace good fellowe and speake better wordes, and go we to London, to cut a purse, then shal we haue money for the ale house, and when wee come backe agayne into the countrey, wee wyll steale some lynnen clothes of one hedges, or robbe some house for a bucke of clothes.
Harman was a Kentish magistrate who claimed to have gathered material for his pamphlet in the course of interviews, at his house in Crayford near Dartford, with vagabonds who had been arrested travelling through the county. And lest this language be thought to be a mere literary fabrication or stylized representation, a remarkable document drawn up half a century later, from similar sources, confirms its genuine use. In 1615-16, John Newbolt, governor of the Bridewell at Winchester in Hampshire, interrogated various of the counterfeiters, pickpockets, fencers, and 'gamesters alias cheaters that live in London and come into the cuntry at fayres to deceave people of ther mony with false dice and cardes'. On the basis of their depositions he drew up a glossary of 107 'canting wordes' which they 'use amongst themselves as their language'. These itinerant fraudsters and thieves hailed not just from London but from all over the south of England: Thomas Baker 'a Devonshire man', John Dolby, 'a Cambridgeshire man', John Clapham 'pentioner at Bury in Suffolk', Hugh Masterson 'borne at Andover in Hampshire'. Yet they were united in a common 'canting tounge' which Newbolt seems to have recorded as an aid to other officials. To take the single example of money, these 'counterfett egiptians' called a penny a 'hyrow', a halfpenney a 'pushera', a groat a 'gorisha', five pence 'shogh hayra', five shillings 'pang shellony' and twenty shillings 'tromen'.
