Words In History: Little Imps
Today we welcome to Open Writing the distinguished historian George Redmonds.
George's diligent research work has won him an international reputation. He has regularly lectured to audiences in Britain, the United States, Australia, and other countries.
He has written books on numerous historical subjects. To see the range of his work and purchase his books please click here
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History is of course recorded in words. Down the decades and centuries the original meaning of a word can be eroded or forgotten. In a weekly series of articles in Open Writing George will be examining words in their historical context.
He begins with the word "imp''. You think you know what an imp is? Do read on - and be both entertained and enlightened.
Few people will have heard of imp yards and yet we know from documentary sources that they were once a common feature of the English landscape, certainly in the northern counties. In 1684, for example, in the West Yorkshire village of Kirkburton, a list of the church glebe lands included a close called the 'Imp-yard'. It butted on the graveyard at its southern end, and was said to be a meadow, consisting of 'two dayes mowing'. The same enclosure is mentioned in later glebe terriers but is not found on any of the early township maps. The first of these dates from 1753 and, since the boundaries of the glebe lands are shown, we at least know that the 'imp yard' had once been roughly where the extension to the cemetery now is.
This 17th century reference is actually quite late, and the place-name Imp Yard has been noted in many parts of the north in earlier centuries. In Yorkshire there are examples in Methley (1366), Aughton (1380) and Rotherham (1385): a Durham imp yard is quoted in the OED for 1337-8 - although it is the only reference that the dictionary contains. In more northerly parts of Yorkshire, and in other northern counties, an alternative term which had the same meaning was imp garth, and examples there take the word back even further. They include 'Ympegard' (c.1250) in Cumberland, and two examples in Yorkshire: 'Impegarde' in Follifoot near Harrogate (1259) and 'Ympegarth' in Kirkby Malham (1454). The oldest place-name seems to be 'Impecrofte', mentioned in an undated Nottinghamshire document of the 1100s. In Lancashire this form of the word even gave rise to a surname, for a certain John Impcroft was taxed as a resident of Salford in 1379.
In very few of these references is there any indication of what an imp yard was, but we know from Old English texts that an 'imp' was the young shoot of a plant, a sapling, so it seems reasonable to infer that imp yards were originally enclosures where young trees were nurtured. Just one of the early Yorkshire documents is explicit. In 1414, a Methley man called John Cook was indicted at the manor court for stealing wood from the imp yards that belonged to the lord of the manor, and the clerk conveniently added the words 'to wit young oaks'. The offender had been stealing saplings, so the imp yard clearly was a kind of specialist market garden or plantation.
We do not know how old the practice was nor when the term imp yard began to fall into disuse but most of those that have been mentioned above were apparently in decline by the 1500s. They may have continued to be called Imp Yards but by then they were typically being used for crops or for livestock - certainly not for young trees. Their changing role is reflected in the field name 'Cowe close otherwise Ympyarde', listed in the Dissolution survey for the priory of Hampole, c.1540.
In Old English 'impa' had to do with the young shoots of plants and then of grafted shoots, and it clearly retained those meanings into the post-Conquest period. It is Chaucer who demonstrates how the term could also be used figuratively, in the line 'Of feeble trees ther comen wrecched impes', emphasising that not all chips off the old block inherit good qualities. References from the 16th century illustrate how the range of figurative uses had grown, especially in connection with children. Prince Edward was 'a goodly ympe' and Spenser wrote of 'learned impes' in 'The Faerie Queene'; elsewhere, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was referred to as 'the noble Impe'.
So 'imp' increasingly came to refer to children, particularly to young boys, and not all the allusions were flattering. The 'imp' might be the scion of a noble house but he could also be a child of the Devil and there are early references to 'ymps of serpentes' and 'wicked imps of the devil'. When these qualifying associations were dropped, the 'imp' came to be the little devil himself, fit to be linked with other evil spirits.
However, the passage of time has seen devilment equated with mischief, and we now use the term 'little imp' in quite an affectionate way.
© George Redmonds, 2009
