Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/48

24 winnowing fan), or the meal (malan) to be ground in the mill (asilu-quairnus = ass-quern) and stored in the meal-ark (arka.Lat. arca) for the bread (h-laibs = loaf) that the good-wife will turn out of the oven (auhns, Sc. oon) to grace the table (biuds, booth, the board, always movable) at the evening meal (nahta-mats). Here sits (sitan) the lord (faths) of the feast, the wairdus (Ger. Wirth) among his guests, his ga-hlaiba or fellows of the loaf, while the servants (thewis, A.S. theow = serf) bestir themselves. The Syro-Phoenician woman helps us to complete the picture: "Yea, but eke the dogs under the table eat of the crumbs (dross) of the bairns" = "jah auk hundos undaro biuda matjand af drauhsnom barne." The morning or working meal is the undaurni-mats, where undaurni is under, in its Ger. rather than Eng. sense, as meaning "intervening time." Undaurni-mats is, therefore, the meal or meat time coming between times of labour. In Early and Middle English it is very common as undern. The occupations of the farm would bulk largely in such a community. In addition to the more easily recognised forms already noticed are a few less obvious but interesting. The barn of the Gospels is bansts, from bindan, to bind as a means of securing. A Lowland Scot would say of a man under stress of passion, "He could nether hud nor binn." The Sc. steading as the stead (Go. staths, a place) or centre of the holding is found in the Go. verb staldan, to own, possess. The manger Wulfila calls uz-eto, what is eaten out of, cf. Ger. aus-essen. The wattled pens in which the animals were stalled may well be implied in flahta, used in the sense of a plaiting of the hair, and connected with flaihtan, to plait (Lat. plectere). The movable fence that the Sc. farmer still uses for sheep feeding off turnips in the field, he calls a flake. Here would be at times secured the "hairda sweine managaize" (herd of many swine) that the Gadarene demoniac saw the hairdeis (herd) haldand (keeping, holding, Sc. huddin). Not far off would be the unsavoury dunghill, maihstus, mixen. The strong guttural of maihstus in the Gothic is still heard in the Sc. mauchie, fulsome, foul-smelling.