Wapentacks: Reference books FTW! (Digital Collections and Archives)

Wapentacks: Reference books FTW!

(Sorry this blog post is so late! We had a seven-hour power failure last week that derailed lots of inessentials.)

Last week, when Jen and I were fixing some special character problems in the digital library, we came across A Mapp of the County of Lincolne, with its divisions & Hundreds: or Wapontacks."Wapontacks"? Our prior experience told us this was surely a typo, so we enlarged the image to look closely. Sure enough, the map really did say "wapontacks"!

This led us straight to my second favorite reference book, The Oxford English Dictionary. (What's YOUR favorite reference book? Tell us in comments!) The OED told us "A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties.". Huh. Curious, we read the etymology:

[a. ON. vápnatak, f. vápna genit. pl. of vápn WEAPON + tak act of taking (related to taka to TAKE). The late OE. wǽpenᵹetæc shows assimilation of form to native compounds like wǽpenᵹewrixle exchange of blows.

The recorded senses of the word in ON. are: (1) a vote of consent expressed by waving or brandishing weapons; (2) a vote or resolution of a deliberative assembly; (3) in Iceland, the breaking up of the session of the Althingi, when the members resumed their weapons that had been laid aside during the sittings. In English there is no trace of these senses, and the development of the actual sense can only be explained conjecturally. It is noteworthy that ‘wapentakes’, like ‘hundreds’, often received their names from some natural or artificial object (e.g. a barrow or a tree) which afforded a suitable rallying-place for open-air meetings. Assuming that in England wapentake originally meant the act of signifying assent at a public assembly, it seems not improbable that the men of the district whose place of meeting was (e.g.) at Osgod's Cross might be said to belong to ‘the wapentake of Osgod's Cross (Osgoldcross)’; the use of the word to denote a territorial division would thus be sufficiently accounted for.]

Now that's just cool.

Try our Mapp of the West Ridinge of Yorke Shire: With its Wapontakes or Britannia: or a Geographical description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the Isles and Territories thereto belonging for a small subset of our collection of documents dealing with wapentakes, wapontacks, wapontacks, and hundreds.

3 Comments

Lance:

Wapentacks! It's like a wappenschawing! In some ways, Merriam Webster is my favorite reference; when I say that something's in "the dictionary", it's the dictionary I typically mean, and I use it on such a regular basis. Lord knows I love the OED for its utter thoroughness, and when I need thoroughness, it's where I go; but it's MW I reach to first.

Posted by Lance | October 20, 2009 8:33 PM

Posted on October 20, 2009 20:33

Allen:

Wapentack is now officially my favorite administrative district classification. (And, really, how do you beat the OED?)

Posted by Allen | October 20, 2009 11:37 PM

Posted on October 20, 2009 23:37

kristin cashore:

Okay, I agree, it's hard to beat the OED, but here's the reference book I depend on most heavily: Webster's New World Thesaurus, Third Edition, edited by Charlton Laird. I've used many a thesaurus and this is easily my favorite. It's alphabetical (I really can't stand those thesauruses [thesauri?] where you look things up in an index and then go searching for a number) and just has SO MANY WORD CHOICES. It almost always gets me where I need to go. Best thesaurus ever for a novelist OMG I LOVE THIS THESAURUS *flops*

Posted by kristin cashore | October 23, 2009 4:11 PM

Posted on October 23, 2009 16:11

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on October 19, 2009 2:37 PM.

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