Open Writing

There are phrases and words we hear as children that we learned to interpret in certain contexts but did not identify individually, and never saw in writing. For example, I often heard my father use the expression ‘forenent’ or even ‘fair forenent’, and I was aware that for him it signified ‘opposite’ or ‘over against’, but it was many years before I considered how it might be spelt, or sought an explanation of its precise meaning and etymology. In fact the way he pronounced it, with no emphasis on the ‘fore’, frustrated my first attempts to locate it in a dictionary.

I was delighted therefore when I came across the word in an early boundary description, in a context not dissimilar to those in which I was accustomed to hear it. The document was dated 1537 and in it the town brook was described as ‘running fore anent Calverley lane end, by the hedge side’. This is very close to the form of the word listed in Wright, where ‘forenent’ is said to have been in general dialect use in Scotland and Ireland but restricted in England to the northern counties.

Spelling developments which involved the introduction of an ‘s’, and changes to the second ‘n’, helped to give the word a most unwieldy appearance. Many of these references are in Yorkshire wills of the Tudor period, identifying particular parts of the churchyard: in 1505, for example, one testator asked to be buried ‘negh to the diall or els fornenst the Palmcrosse’, whilst another, in 1557, preferred a site ‘foranempste the churche porche’. A similar but more picturesque usage occurs in a document of 1481, in which Sir Henry Percy was described as the ‘lieutenant of th’est marches of England affornemptes the Scots’. ‘Forenenst’ might therefore be compared with ‘against’, which also had the ‘s’ and the final so-called parasitic ‘t’.

Much more common than ‘forenent’, and once more widely used, is the shorter word ‘anent’ or ‘anenst’, which denoted position, either ‘against’ or ‘next to’. For example a Wakefield bye-law of 1556 required every tenant ‘to make the pavement anenste his house’, whereas in 1584, in Almondbury, the manorial boundary was said to run ‘along the bottom of the Netherwooding, right anenst the north side of…Robert Royd Ing’.

A parallel to the more unusual spellings of ‘forenent’ quoted above occurs in a York document dated 1590, where it was agreed that whoever ‘should laye anye dounge in Hungate enenpste the Frear walles should pay for every burden 12d’. However, the complicated spellings of these words are balanced by more simplified versions as, for example, in ‘a nans the sadler’ (1526) or a ‘way nens hys grownde’ (1533).

In many sixteenth-century examples ‘anenst’ meant ‘against’ in the sense of ‘towards’. The earliest reference I have come across is in a Star Chamber document of 1443 which referred to riotous behaviour at Fountains Abbey and ordered Sir John Neville ‘to kepe the pees anenst the abbot and convent … and their servantz and welwillers’. Elsewhere there were penalties in 1520 for ‘trespasses doon … both anenste dere and woddes’, and, in c.1522, for crimes done ‘anempst all [the king’s] liege people’. In a South Crosland title deed of 1570 a riverside meadow was said to abut ‘upon the landes of Richard Beaumont anenste the weste … and upon the water of Colne anenste the este’.

Finally ‘anent’ also occurred quite frequently in situations where an individual sought to discharge himself of some liability. Typical expressions in this case are ‘theise oure lettres shalbe your sufficiant warant and discharge anempst us’ (1481), and ‘so that he shall discharge me eneynst the Kynge for my haryotte’ (1552). The ‘haryotte’ (i.e. heriot) was a feudal payment made by an incoming tenant - often his best beast!

The etymology of ‘anent’ is interesting, for it is said to derive from the Old English ‘on efen’, or ‘on even’ if we use the modern equivalents. It meant literally ‘on a level with’ or ‘side by side with’ and progressed to ‘anent’ via Middle English ‘onevent’

© George Redmonds, 2009