io" s. ii. OCT. s, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
283
much puzzled on hearing of " a oatet place,"
and did not find out for some time after-
wards that oatet was the way of pronouncing
altered. Thus smoulder has become smother
(with long o as in so), as " the fire smothers."
Verbs usually keep the termination in -en, as
liven* singen, ivanten. Maken, with short a,
is softened into main, as when it is said of
untidy boys that "they main some work
an' a'." Archaic forms survive in many
words, as feld, field, or feldina, lying in a
field, as when oats have had "too much
folding." Green is pronounced grane, wheel
is whale, feed is fade, and so on. Ten is
pronounced tane ; a road is a rade, as to " go
the gain rade." Light, not heavy, is leyt.
A measure is a mizzer ; the miners had a
mizzering-day. The older people say nawcht
for night, coming near to the German Nacht.
In most words the guttural sound of ch is
rare, though it never becomes sh. It is
sounded like the ch in church. I have a book,
printed in 1726, which belonged to an
ancestress of mine who was born and lived
in the Peak. In it she has written :
When upon a thought of whether Or not your burn'd, The nicter upon the point The more easealy your turn'd.
She was sister of Dr. Charles Balguy, who in 1741 translated the 'Decameron,' and in 1733 she ran away to be married. Now if nigher could be pronounced nicter at this period, one may judge how strong the guttural ch must have been. A plant is sometimes spoken of as feminine, as " she wa' a little bit of a plant last year." Rabbit is pronounced rappit ; a rappit-howt is a rabbit's burrow.
Having now been able to consult the 'New English Dictionary ' and the ' English Dialect Dictionary,' I am not so likely to mention words which are recorded in them, though I ought to say that two sections of the latter work were missing from the library in which I consulted it. To turn again to farming words, the first furrow made in ploughing is called the neivun, and the second the by. Dr. Sweet in his 'A.-S. Dictionary' marks niwung, a rudiment, as a word "formed in slavish imitation of Latin." It may be a good Eng- lish word for all that. When the wheat crop is backward in spring, and turns yellow from want of moisture, they say that it flecks. I am told that " lay ground generally flecks," and that ' * the crop begins a-fleckin' when it is short of manure." "16 never flecks," they say, "but when it is two or three inches high." The time when the crop flecks is in May, and these lines are said :
He that looks at his corn in May
Goes weeping away ;
He that looks again in June
Goes home singing a merry tune.
The word seems to be the M.E. flecchen, from
Lat. flectere, to turn. When stalks of wheat
have been blown across each other by the
wind, so that it is not easy to mow them,
they are said to be crawdelt. This seems
to be identical with the dialectal croodle, to
cower down, but the word is here used in
another and perhaps older sense. It means
entangled. I heard two men bargaining
about the cost of mowing a hayfielo, when
one of them said he would do it, including.
th' hackins, for five shillings. The hacking-
ground is the ditch or steep bank at the
border of a field, which cannot be mown by
the machine or even cut by the scythe in the
usual way. The process of cutting the grass
on the hacking-ground is called dodging, and
the man who does the work is said not to
mow it, but to dodge it. This may be the
oldest sense of that obscure word, and it seems
that hacking and dodging have here the same
meaning. If you watch a man as he is
dodging you will see that the work is not
easy to do, for, to say nothing of the steep
bank, a fallen stone here or a bush there
impedes the scythe. Animals are said to
trashel or trassel, i.e., trample on, the grass.
To fettle often means to fetch, as to " fettle
oats out of a field." In the 'E.D.D.' the word
is derived from M.E. fetlen, to make ready.
It is more likely to be the frequentative of
the M.E. feten, to fetch. When they fettle
the dirt out of the nooks of houses before the
wakes they fetch it out. Where the under-
lying rocks are of limestone the fields are
waterless, so that the cattle have to drink
from artificial dawms or domes. These are-
shaped like a basin or an inverted bell; they
are perfectly round, and are from ten to
twenty feet in diameter. They are lined
with stone and puddled with clay. They are
also called meres. Shullings are groats : " some
calls 'em oats, an' some calls 'em shullins."
" Groats," I was told, " are shulled oats." To
shull is to shed: "cows shull their hair about
March." Endaways means always, as " fowls
in a garden are tiresome endaways." The
field scabious (Scabiosa arvensis) is called odod,
the first o being sounded as in so.
When the moon is surrounded by a halo of mist or cloud they say that "the moon wades- in weather," and that rain is coming. This phrase is often used, and it never varies in form, though I have once heard it applied to the sun, as " the sun wades in weather." A similar expression occurs in the A.-S. poem on 'The right at Finnesburg': "nuscyneS
