Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/305

 Gale), mentioned in Mr. Kingsley's New Forest ballad,— "They wrestled up, they wrestled down, They wrestled still and sore; Beneath their feet, the myrtle sweet, Was stamped in mud and gore." It grows in all the wet places in the Forest, and is excessively sweet, the fruit being furnished with resinous glands. It is said to be extensively used in drugging the beer in the district.

, or grampher. See Wosset.

. Often used in a good sense for luxuriant, and applied to the young green crops, just as "proud," and "rank," or rather "ronk," as it is pronounced, are in the Midland Counties.

. To look "gunney" means, to look archly or cunning. There is also the verb "to gunney." "He gunneyed at me," signifies, he looked straight at me.

, The. The whinchat, so called from its note, which it utters on the sprays of the furze.

. There is a curious phrase, "all to hame," signifying, broken to pieces, used both here and in Wiltshire. Thus the glass, when broken, is said to be "all to hame," that is, "all to bits." The metaphor has been taken from "spindly" wheat on bad ground running to halm, from the Old-English healm, now the West-Saxon peasant's "hame." "All to," I may add, is used adverbially in its old sense of entirely, quite, as we find it in Judges ix. 53.

, The. The hock of a sheep.

. The seeds of the common agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria) and heriff (Cheniopodium album). See Clivers, chap. xv. p. 166.

. A dark place in the woods. See chap. x. p. 110.

. A sieve. See chap. xvi. p. 185, foot-note.

, The. The wild carrot (Daucus carota), used also in Wiltshire. Most probably a corruption of eltrot, old rot, oldroot, and so from the Old-English. These last forms are given in Mr. Barnes' Glossary of the Dorset dialect, p. 336.

. The whitebeam (Sorbus Aria), which, with its white leaves, is very conspicuous in the Forest. We find the word used in the perambulation of the Forest in the twenty-second year of Charles I.,—"by the road called Holloway, and from thence to Horewithey, in the place whereof (decayed) a post standed in the ground." It is exactly the same as the "har wiðig" of the Old-English. It is called also, but more rarely, the "white rice." See chap. xvi. p. 183.

, To. To simmer, boil; evidently formed, like so many other words, by an onomatopöetic process (See chap. xvi. p. 186). There is also the phrase, "the kettle is on the hoo," that is, to use a vulgarism, on the simmer, or boil.

, To go a. To go where you like. "He is going a hoop," means, he is going to the bad.

. A cordial which is made from the common horse-mint (Mentha aquatica). Does "hum" here mean strong, as it is used in some counties with reference to beer? See chap. xv. p. 166.

. The Joseph's-ladder of the Midland Counties, common in all the cottage gardens round the Forest. It is curious to notice, amongst our peasantry, the religious element in the names of both the wild and cultivated flowers derived from Catholic times. Thus we have ladies' cushions, and ladies' tresses, and St. Peter's-wort, and St. John's wort, besides the more common plants, such as marygolds and ladysmocks, which every one can remember.

. Weak. The more North-country word "tuly" is also heard in the same sense.

, To. To jump, leap, or bound. Used especially of the Forest deer, which 283