This week in
Johnson’s Dictionary I came upon a previously
unknown and possibly salacious word: hotcockles.
It immediately implanted an earworm: “Molly Malone.” Johnson’s definition is
strictly G-rated: “a play in which one covers his eyes, and guesses who
strikes him.” “Play” here is intended in the eighteenth-century sense of a child’s
game. Next I shifted to the OED and
found riches. The word’s origin is uncertain but the definition is more
extensive: “a game in which one player lies face downwards, or kneels down with
the eyes covered, and attempts to guess which of the other players has struck
him or her on the back.” Sort of a variation of blind man’s buff (the last word
meaning a slight push) or bluff. Hotcockles reached its height of popularity in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dictionary gives citations from
Sidney, Marvell, Gay and Horace Walpole.
Now it
starts getting steamy. The OED gives
a second definition unknown to Johnson or ignored by him: “Sexual intercourse.
Chiefly in to play at hot cockles: to
have sexual intercourse; (perhaps also) to stimulate the genitals of a woman
manually.” The three citations all date from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The third is from a novel I had never heard of, The Accomplish’d Rake (1727) by Mary Davys: “He had burnt his
Fingers playing at Hot-Cockles with the Drabs [OED: “harlot, prostitute, strumpet”] of Drury.”
"...the Drabs of Drury."
ReplyDeleteThat word "Drury" is interesting. Is it certain that it is a place-name?
With your indulgence, I'd like to quote at length from an article I wrote called “'Sorcery and Sanctity':Tolkien’s 'The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun' and Other Eldritch Poems," which was published in the Tolkienian newsletter Beyond Bree. I discuss Tolkien's "Lay of Aotrou and Itroun," and add:
---In 1930, evidently, the same time that Tolkien wrote “The Lay,” C. S. Lewis wrote “In a Spring Season I Sailed Away” (742 lines). It seems to me a rare and beautiful poem, more mythic than weird or eldritch. A shipwrecked master sailor explores an uncharted island in which grow flowers and trees of unearthly magnificence. He encounters a woman whose “beauty burned in [his] blood,” so that “with many a dear craving / [he] wooed the woman under the wild forest, “[d]reaming of druery” (lines 102-104). When she mocks and laughs at him, he resolves to rape “the witch.”
I’ll pause over druery. Later in Lewis’s poem, an elf teaches druery to a virgin before he brings her to the mariner as his bride (line 578). The poem also refers to “mortals’ / Dreams of druery.” The word often means verbal, courtly lovemaking or gallantry. As drury the word appears twice in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Sections 59 and 60 of Tolkien’s translation): “Much speche thay ther expoun / of druryes greme and grace” (Tolkien’s translation: “Much speech then there they spent / of lovers’ grief and grace”); “Endured for her drury much dulful stoundes” (Tolkien: “endured for their dear one dolorous trials”). Readers of the Middle English poem will remember the wiles of the lady. Her first attempt on Gawain’s chastity was a frank physical offering, but she soon realizes that she must be more cunning if she is to seduce him, and so he engages him in elegant conversation about lovers.
Druery may in Lewis’s mind and Tolkien’s have been associated with magic and illicit sexual activity thanks to their study of the poet John Gower. In the medieval Confessio Amantis, Book VI Gluttony, we read of “wicché craft, / That some men clepen sorcery, / Which for to win his druery / With many a circumstance he useth, / There is no point which he refuseth.” Lewis and Tolkien knew Gower’s book well enough to draw important material from it in scholarly works of the later 1930s. As used by Lewis in his “In a Spring Season,” druery seems to have some flexibility, suggesting legitimate wooing eventually, but love-talk leading rapidly to lustful embraces in its first use. Similarly, the witch in “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” is certainly inviting the lord to something other than decorous flirtation in the passage I’ve quoted above.---
I look forward to getting my copy of C. T. Onions' Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, which will no doubt start me off on a lot of hare-chases.
Incidentally, on the authority of the excellent Tom Shippey, the scholar's name should be pronounced "on-aye-ons" -- not as we pronounce the name of the familiar garden plant.
Dale Nelson
Old French druerie, droerie, druirie ‘love, friendship’, Occitan druda, may come from Proto-Germanic *drūþaz 'friend, beloved’ (Meyer-Lübke in Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch cites Gothic drubs ‘beloved’). The Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (III, 164), on the other hand, prefers Gaulish *druto 'strong, vigorous’ as the ultimate etymon. In any case, the word gave rise to the family name Drury and from their residence there, the Drurys gave their name to London’s Drury Lane (formerly Via de Aldwych). John Donne lived there next to his patron sir Robert Drury from 1612 to 1621. When Pope came to imitate Donne’s Satire Two (1713), Drury Lane had become associated with prostitution, probably on account of the Drury Lane Theatre (1663) and the proximity of Covent Garden, famous for its “nuns”:
ReplyDeleteCurs’t be the Wretch! so venal and so vain;
Paltry and proud as Drabs of Drury-lane.
Second Satire of John Donne Versified ll. 63-4
Three years later, John Gay writes
O! may thy Virtue guard thee through the Roads
Of Drury's mazy Courts, and dark Abodes,
The Harlots' guileful Paths, who nightly stand,
Where Katherine-street descends into the Strand.
Say, vagrant Muse, their Wiles and subtil Arts,
To lure the Stranger's unsuspecting Hearts .. . Trivia III, ll. 259-64
And then there’s Johnson’s friend, Oliver Goldsmith:
Where the Red Lion staring o’er the way,
Invites each passing stranger that can pay;
Where Calvert’s butt, and Parson’s black champaign,
Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane;
A Description of an Author’s Bed-chamber” ll. 1-4
Johnson himself suffered the curse of Drury/druerie, but from the theatre actresses rather than the prostitutes. To the drabs of Drury and elsewhere he was notably compassionate:
The Ramber No 107. March 26, 1751
"How frequently have the gay and thoughtless, in their evening frolicks, seen a band of those miserable females, covered with rags, shivering with cold, and pining with hunger; and, without either pitying their calamities, or reflecting upon the cruelty of those who perhaps first seduced them by caresses of fondness, or magnificence of promises, go on to reduce others to the same wretchedness by the same means!"
The Rambler No 171 November 5 1751
"If those who pass their days in plenty and security, could visit for an hour the dismal receptacles to which the prostitute retires from her nocturnal excursions, and see the wretches that lie crowded together, mad with intemperance, ghastly with famine, nauseous with filth, and noisome with disease; it would not be easy for any degree of abhorrence to harden them against compassion, or to repress the desire which they must immediately feel to rescue such numbers of human beings from a state so dreadful.”
He took one, Poll Carmichael, into his household and rescued another he found one night in a dreadful state.
Colin Eaton