{"id":74,"date":"2003-05-12T18:15:53","date_gmt":"2003-05-12T22:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/05\/12\/liber-bibulus-legis-yeomans-service\/"},"modified":"2003-05-12T18:15:53","modified_gmt":"2003-05-12T22:15:53","slug":"liber-bibulus-legis-yeomans-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/05\/12\/liber-bibulus-legis-yeomans-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Liber bibulus legis, yeoman’s service"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Lucky day – I found a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary in a “free” pile this morning.<\/p>\n

It was written by Henry Campbell Black, M.A. – “Author of Treatises on Judgements, Tax Titles, Intoxicating Liquors, Bankruptcy, Mortgages, Constitutional Law, Interpretation of Laws, Rescission and Cancellation of Contracts, Etc.”<\/p>\n

Looks like a pretty fun guy except for all the law stuff!<\/p>\n

Looking up “villein”, I came across “villein service” – the service due to a feudal lord by his peasants, more or less. This called to mind the phrase “yeoman service”, which isn’t in Black’s. However, it is used in Ulysses<\/i>, in the cliché-ridden “Eumaeus” chapter – on their way to the cabstand here<\/a> and talking about Parnell, I guess, here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The attentive reader will no doubt also recall that Hamlet uses this phrase in one<\/a> of his breezily superior, wonderfully queeny remarks – but he uses it with a difference, as “yeoman’s service”.<\/p>\n

It seems slightly strange for Shakespeare to have that apostrophe-ess on yeoman – being addicted to legal terminology as he was, he might have intended “yeoman service” to contrast with “villein service”. If he were creating the phrase strictly analogously, he would probably want to use yeoman attributively, as is done with villein service. It’d be fun to check through the quartos and the folio and see whether any of them lacks the apostrophe-ess here…<\/p>\n

BTW, another fun dictionary, by a chap named E. Cobham Brewer, has an<\/a> entry on this too. Unfortunately he doesn’t provide any quotations earlier than the 19th century, so it’s still not clear that the “reference is to the yeomen of the Free Companies” as he claims…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucky day – I found a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary in a “free” pile this morning. It was written by Henry Campbell Black, M.A. – “Author of Treatises on Judgements, Tax Titles, Intoxicating Liquors, Bankruptcy, Mortgages, Constitutional Law, Interpretation of Laws, Rescission and Cancellation of Contracts, Etc.” Looks like a pretty fun guy except […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}