Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/49

Rh The civic unit was the householder, the garda waldands, wielder of the yard. The term gards has lived long as Gart, Gort, Garth in place-names, and in Norse-Celtic districts signifying a farm-stead (Go. staths, stads, Sc. steading). Gud-hus is the only use of our word house, and means God's-house or temple. The preference for gards instead of hus suggests that primitive type of farm-life in which a settler effects a clearing in the primeval forest and encloses his home (af-haims = from home) like the Sc. farm-toon, for this is the radical sense of both gards and Sc. toon. Its roof is the hrot, uncovered to admit the paralytic into the room where Jesus was. In the Heliand, a Low-German poem of the ninth century upon the Saviour's life, this sufferer is admitted "thurk thes huses hrost," through the house's roof. Hrot, roof, roost, all originally indicated the rafters on which the fowls perched. "Rule the roost" is really an analogous phrase to Cock of the walk. The paralytic was let down through the tiles—skaljos, Eng. scale—a word which shows they must have been slates, for to the Scottish schoolboy his slate-pencil was long known as skeelyie—the actual Gothic term we have here. Of course skaljos would equally apply to thin slabs of stone, still a roofing material in the Border districts, and on old churches. At the end of the house rose the gibla (Sc. and Du. gevel), that pinnacle of the Temple to which the Tempter led Christ. In front was the porch, after the fashion of a Boer stoep, and known as the ubizwa (our eaves). The door (daur) and the window (auga-dauro = eye-door) completed the external view. Inside the house, on the middle of the floor, stood the sacred vesta of the Romans, the Go. hauri, our hearth, the ascending smoke (rikwis, Sc. reek) of which escaped as it best might from its pile of ashes (azgo). Over it mayhap hung the kettle (katils, from kasa, a pot), with chair and bench (stols and sitls = Ger. Stuhl, settle) not far off.

The larger social centre was the baurgs (Eng. burgh, Sc. broch), translating πόλις, and meaning, literally, a walled place, from bairgan, to preserve. Some kind of enclosure secured the Go. baurgs, for baurgs waddjan is the town-wall of Damascus, whence St. Paul escaped by a basket. The term waddjan here, akin to withe, wattle, widdie, points to a kind of fence still very common in Holland, and formed of plaited willow or hazel twigs.