Public Cries in the Medieval Languages of Britain: Haro! Havoc!

The regular meaning today of the word havoc is “confusion” and “disorder” (Oxford English Dictionary [Oxford English Dictionary [OED], s.v. havoc). Fixed phrases are “to wreck, play, make havoc.” This is seen as an attenuated use of an earlier havoc that meant “devastation, destruction.” In the Middle Ages havoc figured in even more closely defined circumstances. To cry havoc meant that an army was relieved by its commanders of its normal discipline and reserve, and was permitted to proceed with the plundering and destruction of a conquered town or encampment. As the OED states “the phrase cry havoc, originally to give to an army the order havoc!, as the signal for the seizure of spoil, and so of general spoliation or pillage.” We may imagine this as a customary right of men under arms, held in check by later codified ordinances for the battlefield. As is typical for the OED in the matter of loans from other languages, the etymological commentary goes no farther back in time and place than to Old French, where the phrase crier havot is found. This clearly vernacular word is also found in Latin texts of the period. Havot is seen as the normal form in continental French, havoc in the French of Britain, and havok in the later Middle English that supplanted Anglo-French. Just where this phrasing and the idea behind it may have originated remains beyond the scope and ambitions of the OED. This is not the case with all French lexicographical resources. Since the practice of crying havoc dies out after the late Middle Ages, the word has not survived into modern French and is then not discussed in such authoritative works as Le Trésor de la langue française (TLF, Imbs). There is, however, ample attestation of its medieval use, e.g., “le Roy ad proclamé havoke de tout Gales” (the king proclaimed havoc throughout Wales; 1385, “Ordin. War Rich.II,” Legge, 374.31) (see further Rothwell et al., s.v. havoke), Godefroy, 4,444 c havot 2, Tobler and Lommatzsch, 4, 1042 havot 2). A major lexicographical project now in the course of realization, Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF), offers a full treatment of the evidence for continental French havot (Baldinger et al., H307 havot 2 [havok]). Yet the discussion opens with the regrettable judgment “étymologie inconnue.” Scholars who have examined the matter propose that havot originated in Germanic words designating a hook-like device. Opinions differ as to which lexical root is involved. The figurative use of the hook would be consonant with the understanding of the cry Havot! as the authorization to seize goods. The editors of the DEAF subscribe to none of these derivations. The present inquiry is prompted by the resemblance between Anglo-French havoc and Old English heafoc (diPaulo-Healey et al., s.v), the antecedent of Modern English hawk, and by the less fortuitous coincidence between the hawk as bird of prey or raptor, and the military rapine loosed by crying havoc. The early English name for the hawk has cognates all over the Germanic world (Old Norse haukr German Habicht, Old Frisan havek), and was even loaned into Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Veps), perhaps as a consequence of the international trade in birds of prey (de Vries; Köbler, Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch). The proposed Proto-Indo-European root behind the Germanic hawk forms is *kap-, *kəp“to grasp, seize” (Köbler, Indogermanisches Wörterbuch, Pokorny 527). The name is also present as havik in Old Low Franconian, the language carried by the Franks to the future France. Germanic did not, however, supply the standard French word for “hawk,” which was faucon, from Latin falco. How plausible is it that the image of the hawk should generate a term to designate the right/ permission of common soldiers to plunder? Animals are associated with human combat in multiple ways. The beasts of battle (wolf, eagle, and raven) feed on the bodies of the fallen. Odin’s ravens report ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES AND REVIEWS 2022, VOL. 35, NO. 2, 98–101 https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2020.1779644