Hornywinks and crowdy-kits

Romanusque lyra, plaudat tibi barbarus harpa, Graecus Achilliaca, chrotta Britanna canat.

If it is true that the study of English folklore has suffered excessively from the malady of unfounded speculation (Simpson and Roud 2000, vi), any attempt to venture beyond established facts might be regarded as foolhardy. On the other hand, the questions implicit in established facts cry out for answers, and the serious student must on occasion rise to the challenge, afterwards to be judged on the merit of the case he/she makes. Of course one needs to tread carefully, perhaps altogether avoiding the minefields left by decades of theorisation, and concentrating instead on smaller problems at the edges.

One such problem is as follows. Over one hundred years ago a contributor to Transactions of the Devonshire Association wrote:

   We cannot say why the inhabitants of Bradford, near Holsworthy, are
   called "horniwinks" or "pewits" or "lapwings," although we know it
   is so, and that the taunt of being a "Bradford horniwink" is a very
   dire insult (Prickman 1898, 325).

Surely the time has now come to go beyond these particular facts, convincingly presented so long ago, and seek an explanation for them. Who can predict where such a search will lead?

Our first task will be to adduce parallels within the county. To Bradford horniwinks we may in fact add the nicknames Bradworthy horniwigs and Challacombe horniwinks--Bradworthy, like Bradford, being near Holsworthy, while Challacombe is in the western part of Exmoor (Chope 1930, 71). Since Bradworthy and Challacombe, but presumably also Bradford, were renowned for their lapwings (Wright 1970, vol. 3, 235-6), birds conspicuous for their eerie calls, unusual crests and tumbling flight, we may reasonably assume a joking transference of the bird's name to its human neighbours. It is after all in the nature of blason populaire to fasten on some local peculiarity in this way. Often the name survives where the circumstances have been forgotten. Sometimes, however, these may still be descried, as with, say, Brixham dabs, Moreton tatie-eaters, or Paignton pudding-eaters, all three of which allude to fare for which the respective localities were famous or notorious (Chope 1930, 71-3).

The sobriquet Bradford horniwinks and its parallels call for further comment. They will have been occasioned, not merely by the local frequency of lapwings and the apparent oddity of those birds, but also by the nature of the places attracting them. In Cornwall, hornywinky meant "desolate, outlandish, like a moor where 'horniwinks' resort," and an ancient, tumbledown, out-of-the-way dwelling could be described as "an old shabrag horny-wink place" (Wright 1970, vol. 3, 235-6). The nickname Bradford horniwinks will thus have incensed those at whom it was directed not least because of the implication that their native heath was desolate, neglected and god-forsaken. Compare the Lincolnshire designation peewit-ground or peewit-land for poor undrained land such as pewits might frequent. The name pewit is matched in the north by the similarly onomatopoeic teufit, and here teufit-land was cold, damp, bleak and barren land. To speak of "puir teufit-laand" was to impute to the owner a lack of proper management and drainage. A west Yorkshire variant of teufit was tewit, and in Batley and Dewsbury the districts of Hanging Heaton and Earlsheaton were in derision termed tiuit-land. The reference was to the loneliness and barrenness of the places so named, the human inhabitants of which were Tiuiters or Tiuit-landers (Wright 1970, vol. 6, 70, 71-2). Entirely analogously, in the Rhineland the inhabitants of Kleve-Griethe were "Griethe pewits" (Griether Kiwitte), and nicknames given to the inhabitants of other out-of-the-way villages likewise alluded to pewits (Muller 1928-71, vol. 4, 588). The sobriquet Bradford horniwinks thus finds itself in excellent company.

All this sheds light on problems not mentioned so far. When, in chapter forty of The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler says that "looking for a watch and purse on Battersby piewipes was very like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay" (Butler 1966, 201 and 438), piewipes seems obscure until we realise that it means "pewits." The wild and featureless north Yorkshire moorland referred to gets its name, like the west Yorkshire tiuit-land already mentioned, from the pewits frequenting it. Still farther afield, in the Rhineland, desolate moorland was "pewit-moor" (Piwicksbrouk), and a traditional imprecation involved telling someone unpopular to "go to the pewit-moor" (Muller 1928-71, vol. 6, 902). Up to the nineteenth century, in parts of Switzerland, a piece of Shrovetide horse-play known as the Giritzenmoosfahrt (outing to the pewit moor) consisted of rounding up all the local "old maids"--that is, unmarried women over the age of, say, twenty-four, or lads impersonating them--and transporting them to a desolate pewit moor. At the back of this lay, we are told, the primitive belief that people, animals and even fields could be infected by the sterility of old maids, who after death in fact became plaintively crying pewits on the pewit moor. Alternatively, once in that place, they somehow retained their human form, but were obliged to perform impossible or useless tasks, such as herding pewits, or knitting gaiters for them. Relics of such beliefs are widespread. In Luxemburg, for instance, old maids were said to cry "Pewit" after death (Weiss 1984, 201-2; Hoffmann-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli 1927-41, vol. 1, 334-44 and 674; vol. 9, 29-30). It may be that old maid, a Worcestershire dialect name for the pewit (Wright 1970, vol. 4, 340), is yet another such survival. [1]