By Nancy Thomas

Reading early inventories gradually makes one very wary. Things are not always what they seem, and the wise transcriber learns to keep a good historical dictionary at the ready. For example, swine are safely pigs, but pigs are baby swine, and hogs, of course, are sheep. Yeats are gates, but gates are roads. And saucers are for holding sauce, not tea cups. There are many words, common enough in our 17th century inventories and hence in the usage of the period, which have either vanished altogether from the language or passed into dialect usage.

Some of the items that could have been found in Warton houses are doublers, large plates or dishes cruses, drinking cups ream pots, pots for holding cream trustee or tristes, trestles to support the boards that made the table tops buffet stools, posh 3-legged stools, possibly joined or covered happings or happyns, coverlets or bed quilts coods or cods, pillows or cushions

There are a large number of words for containers made of various materials and used for various purposes. Among the wooden vessels are knops, very common tubs of assorted uses, usually unspecified. gathering knops, knops used in ale-making to hold the whole brew fats, vats, actually, or tubs whose purpose is often specified gile fats, vats used to hold the fermenting wort in ale-making salting fats, vats used for preserving neat whinocks, milk pails, a word of Celtic derivation skeeles, also milk pails, but Scandinavian Wicker or woven containers include swills, large shallow baskets made roughly with strips of oak or unpeeled willow scuttles or scootles, large baskets for winnowing grain mands, baskets with handles for moving grain in a granary or bam hotts, pack baskets for carrying manure, lime, sand containers and measures seem to overlap, containers probably coming to be used as local measures and often apparently associated with specific types of produce.

In this category might come wisketts, baskets often associated with wool windies, baskets used as corn measures fetlets, bags or sacks possibly for wool poaks, small sacks probably for holding grain (though more famous for holding pigs) strikes, wooden measuring vessels for grain hoops, measuring vessels possibly holding 1/4 strikes.

Husbandry tools present a bewildering array of strange terms: spittles, small spades hacks, hoe or pick-axe type tools hatches, hatchets gave locks, crowbars wombles or wimbles, augers, braces tixells or thixells, adzes stees, ladders. And a stee-even, a kind of step-ladder? flacks, wattled hurdles used as temporary gates.

Among the animals commonly kept were kye, cows whyes or quyes, heifers stotts, young castrated oxen speanings, weanling pigs.

Wearing apparel includes such items as – sarkes, garments worn next to the skin, chemises or shirts safeguards, outer skirts or petticoats worn by women when riding to protect their dress slopps, wide baggy breetches say aprons, fine-textured woollen aprons kelter hose, hose made of coarse cloth warde or warday suits, everyday or workaday as opposed to Sunday suits.

Finally, three miscellaneous items: reeing sieves, sieves for cleaning or sifting winnowed grain haircloths, not penitential shirt fabric but screens made of coarse woven hair on which sprouted barley was dried in malt kilns smowetinirands, smoothing irons. Still unsolved is the meaning of eIlers, Best guess to date, lids made of the wood of elder or alder used to cover the brewing fats. (All definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary)

Published in Mourholme Magazine Issue 4 Summer 1983