This week I read James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks; or, The Venereal Game (2nd edition, 1977), a discursive collection and celebration of “terms of venery” — the collective nouns like “school of fish” and “pride of lions” that were (so the story goes) mostly invented by medieval hunters who wanted to have their own proper jargon to distinguish the real hunters from the dilettantes.

Hark ye! Only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young squire at the court.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Nigel (1905)

Lipton’s starting point was a list of 164 terms for “the companies of beasts and fowls” included — merely to fill out the last few pages of a signature (so says William Blades’ excellent preface) — in the Book of St Albans (1486). But from Lipton’s entertaining notes we can see he modernized a few of the terms; for example, he discusses his difficulty in rendering the term “corueseris” (corvisers) for modern readers, and ultimately lands on “shoemakers.” This led me to wonder exactly what other changes Lipton might have snuck in, and therefore to look up the original orthography of the Book of St Albans. That orthography is visible today both in Blades’ facsimile and in Unicode transliteration at Project Gutenberg. I was surprised to find that Lipton’s title, in the Book of St Albans, is rendered as “an exaltyng of larks”; it’s only in Egerton MS 1995 (fols. 55b–58), Lipton says, that we find “an exaltacyon of larks” proper.

C. E. Hare, in The Language of Field Sports (2nd edition 1949) — which Lipton cites! — points out that many of the Book’s terms are not really “company terms.” For example, “a couple or pair of bottles” is no more a company term than “a brace of pheasants” or “a trio of tenors”; and as far as I can tell, “a cast of bread” parallels our “loaf of bread”: no more a company term than “a jug of wine.”

Hare’s notes on the Book are well worth reading. See pages 232–239 for his collection of neologisms including “a glitter of flying-fish” (R. Beale), “a sending of robins” (L. Dawson Campbell), and “a scold of magpies.”

Hare credits “a scold of magpies” to Country Life magazine; but searching that periodical I find only a Letter to the Editor from J. H. Owen (in the 1941-09-26 issue) on the subject of “Congregations of Magpies” which also uses the terms “flock” and “party” but never (as noun nor verb) “scold.”

Here are the terms of venery from the Book of St Albans, starting with those for beasts and fowls that might be considered “serious,” and followed by those for human beings of various professions which we might consider “jocular.” The original makes no such distinction: serious and jocular are thoroughly intermixed. My tables appear in alphabetical order, except that I’ll start as the Book does with “herd,” a term associated with the royalty of the animal world.

The jocular terms for companies of human beings and/or inanimate objects:

Leaving An Exaltation of Larks behind, the next list in the Book of St Albans interested me because I had serendipitously just seen it quoted in H. H. Furness’s notes on Love’s Labours Lost, regarding the use of the technical term “break up” in IV.i:

COSTARD: I have a letter from Monsieur Berowne to one Lady Rosaline.

PRINCESS: O, thy letter, thy letter! He’s a good friend of mine. Stand aside, good bearer.—Boyet, you can carve; Break up this capon.

In fact the Book of St Albans says that a capon is not “broken up” at table but “sawsed.” One might guess (as Henry Scougal apparently does in his 1789 New Academy of Compliments) that that word means “sawn,” i.e. “cut up,” but in fact it means “sauced.”

Many of these terms are repeated, as commands, in Wynken de Worde’s Boke of Kervynge (1508).

Note the difference between St Albans’ “an ele trousoned” and Kervynge’s “trassene that ele.” Charles Cooper in The English Table in History and Literature (1929) splits the difference and writes “traunsene an eel.” A comic poem in the Literary Gazette of 1827-06-23 has “eels were transened.” A correspondent in Notes & Queries (January 1918) mangles it all the way to “transom an eel.” I’ve gone with “trassened” for no particular reason.

Note that the two Bokes swap their verbs for bittern and curlew: you unjoint the one and untach the other, but they can’t decide which is which. Some modernizations have “untack that curlew,” but untach (like tranch) seems to be good old French: already in Middle English tachen means “pin together,” and so untach would mean “take apart.” (Another sense of tachen relates to a visible token predictive of tetchiness.)

Finally, the Book of St Albans provides a short list of words for when animals bed down for the night:

The hare in her form is proverbial for being snug-fitting and inconspicuous (like a sea hare in its own habitat), as in Jonathan Swift’s poem on mint-master for Ireland William Wood (1725):

The next is an Insect we call a Wood-worm,
That lies in old Wood like a Hare in her Form.

The shallow temporary scrapes of rabbit or roe posed a hazard to hikers: stepping into one and taking a tumble, one might find oneself “in a scrape.” (Eclectic Magazine July 1865.) Similarly, if one took a tumble aboard ship, one might be said to be “scuppered.” (“Scupper,” Notes & Queries 1910-10-08).

A to B: “Mr. C reminds me of a hare.” — “In what way?” — “In that he’ll always lie in a scrape.”

The opposite of “in her form” is “in relief,” i.e., “standing out” (cf. bas-relief). Reverse the syllables and you get lièvre, the French for “hare,” which relates to livre as coney does to coin (i.e., not at all).