Words In History: Fey
George Redmonds traces from c.1205 onwards the use of the word ‘fay’’ or ‘fey’ which by the sixteenth century had come to mean to ‘to clear away’.
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The OED contains references to a verb ‘to fay’, with examples from c.1205 to 1400, meaning ‘to clean’, especially to clean weapons. There is then a gap from 1400 to 1573 when Tusser employed the word in his book on good husbandry. New references from Yorkshire now add considerably to our understanding of how to fay was developing the sense of to ‘clear away’ in the sixteenth century.
In 1533, for example, a Wakefield tenant was ordered at the borough court to ‘fey hys donge hyll a way’, so that it would not interfere with the town sewer or ‘skytterick’. Something of the same idea is contained in the accounts of a Sheffield iron forge, in 1547, where a workman was paid ‘for feyinge of synders’. At St Michael’s in York, in 1539, two labourers worked on repairs to John Robinson’s house, and received 2s from the churchwardens ‘for feyng of the ground wall that was falyn down’. They were preparing the site for new foundations. A lease of 1578 allowed Thomas Lockwood of Thurstonland to clear the land that he was about to occupy, specifically ‘to feye and stubbe up … all maner of woddes’.
The meaning extended to the cleansing of ponds and streams, either simply because they had to be kept flowing smoothly or to scour out the accumulated mud for use on the land. In 1570 each Halifax householder was ordered to ‘feye the watercourse … against his own house’. Hunter’s Hallamshire Glossary (1829) gave the meaning ‘to empty, as a pond, of mud. The spelling he used was ‘feigh’, which I have found in coal-mining accounts for Farnley in 1717. This may be by analogy with ‘weigh’ and it represents the west Yorkshire pronunciation.
A more specific meaning was ‘to winnow’. An East Yorkshire farmer wrote of oats being ‘threshed and feyed’ (1642), and references in Stillingfleet to ‘ij feing clothes’, as early as 1535, prove that this was not a recent development. Feying cloths were winnowing cloths, and they feature frequently in the inventories of farmers. In Holmfirth, in 1734, there is also a solitary reference to a ‘feying rake’.
The word remained in common use through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even into the modern period. It is met with in commonplace books, diaries and, particularly, in coal mining and farming records. In Tong, William Barker was paid for ‘feying the draw end’ of the colliery (1760) and in 1815 a South Crosland farmer wrote of the time he spent ‘feying for the Coal hole’ of his new house. In 1819 he was ‘faying down hills’ as he levelled land newly enclosed from the moor.
Copyright © George Redmonds
