Words In History: Good, Goods
Historian George Redmonds brings historical reference which show how the plural noun 'goods' was used in connection with livestock.
To read more of George's articles concerning the changes in the meaning of words down the centuries please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/words_in_history/
We are very familiar with the plural noun 'goods', used in the sense of movable property, but formerly the word could also be used for livestock, certainly in Scotland and the north of England.
An Aberdeen document of 1562 refers to the 'pasturing of guidis', and an East Riding lady, in her will of 1533 defined her 'goodes, as horse, mayres, sheipe and swyne, and the half of my neite'. The word was used frequently in wills and also in manorial documents, typically in by-laws that warned tenants not to 'putt any goodes or cattelles into the Townefeilds' (1635).35 In 1608 William Atkinson of Malham was fined 'for eating Scaylgill with his goodes'.
In fact it was not unusual for the distinction between the two meanings to be drawn in wills, where livestock would be described as '*quick goods' and moveables as 'dead goods'. In 1552, John Scott of Thorp Arch left his 'goodes, both qwicke and dead' to his wife. In a Barwick will of 1593 the testator defined his 'deade goods' as 'implements of husbandrye or household stuff. 'Quick good', in the singular, was quite often the mortuary left by a parishioner to the minister of the local church. Thus, in 1485, Margaret Piggot left her 'best quyke goode to the kyrke'.
According to Wright the word was still in use in the second half of the nineteenth century, and examples occurred not only in the northern counties but as far south as Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Although this meaning of 'goods' may still be in occasional dialect use, few northern glossaries mention the word.
