By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English

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In his forties. How old was this man!

He was right. An accent would be thoroughly established by then, and it would take a huge change in circumstances to shift it. Accents exist to express your identity. They tell people where you are from. And they get established very early in life. Children have them by the age of three. New accents come easily during childhood and into the teenage years. When a family moves from one part of the country to another, it’s invariably the children who pick up the new accent first.

But no accent is immune from its surroundings. And, indeed, in the old farmer’s voice I could hear the occasional Welsh lilt. I wanted to hear more of it. So I asked him about his stick.

‘I always thought shepherds had crooks,’ I said.

‘Ay,’ he said, ‘that’s true, but I haven’t meself for quite a while.’

He paused. ‘Did ye know that there are different kinds of crooks?’

He said the word with a long oo, asin croon.

I had to confess I didn’t. My definition of crook would be a stick with one end bent into a hooked sort of shape. I was vague about why. The linguist in me suggested a link with by hook or by crook, but I couldn’t immediately think of a good reason why this phrase should have come into existence.

The next five minutes was a tutorial on crooks. I hadn’t realised crook-making was such a precise craft. And I hadn’t realised that classic crooks have hooks at both ends, one larger than the other. One end is large enough to catch hold of a sheep’s neck; the other end is smaller, for catching hold of the hind foot. He called it a ‘leg cleek’. I heard it as ‘clayk’, and only established the spelling when I looked it up later. Not an everyday word. It took me three dictionaries to find it. Never an easy matter finding a word in a dictionary if you don’t know how to spell it. Cleak? Cliek? Cleke?

It seems to have been a Scottish word originally, in the fifteenth century. A hook for catching hold of something, or pulling something, or hanging something up. Fishermen used it a lot. And then it turned up again in the nineteenth century, in golf, referring to a type of club. There’s an early instance recorded in 1829: golfers at St Andrews are described as swinging their ‘drivers and cleeks’. At that time it was spelled cleques.

In parts of Scotland, to this day, if someone calls you cleeky, they mean you’re grasping, captious.

And in the jazz era it turned up again, meaning a wet blanket at a party, a party-pooper. Beatniks in the US used it in the 1960s for any sad or melancholy person. Could that be the same word? Did it cross the Atlantic with some Scots emigrants?

I learned from my farmer friend that the space between the shank and the nose of a neck crook was usually the width of the four fingers of a person’s hand. It should be wide enough to comfortably slip over the forearm. The leg cleek has a width of one old English penny. That would make it about three centimetres.

He also mentioned that the crook had been used for fighting in the old days. He didn’t say how old those days were, or who were the fighters. English and Scots shepherds at Carter Bar, perhaps? Later, I recounted this conversation to a friend who’s into martial arts in a big way, and he wasn’t at all surprised. He’d used sticks in some fights, and he could see the value of having one with two hooks, especially if they were good at trapping necks and legs. And then he asked me: ‘Is that where by hook or by crook comes from?’

I was at home at the time, so wordbooks were everywhere. I found references to the phrase in three books straight away – and found three different explanations. That’s the trouble with folk idioms. The origins of many of them are lost, and people have to start guessing where they came from. Quite often there are some nice pieces of real evidence from literature or history.

The first use of hook and crook seems to have been in the writing of the Bible translator John Wiclife – or Wycliffe, as he is usually spelled today. That was around 1380. He wrote about the sale of sacraments and people being made to buy them ‘with hook or crook’. Plainly the phrase already had its modern meaning, ‘by all possible means, fair or foul’. The modern expression, with by used twice, is known from at least 1529.

When a dictionary says a word was first recorded at such-and-such a date, you have to take it with a pinch of salt. It might mean that the word was invented in that year, but it usually doesn’t. People have generally been using a word for a while before it gets written down. In the Middle Ages, when things weren’t written down all that often, a phrase like hook and crook would probably have been in everyday speech for decades before the 1380s. Wycliffe had a good ear for common idiom, and tried to make his translation of the Bible as down-to-earth as possible. If he used the phrase, it was certainly out on the street.

The two words hook and crook had already been in English for several hundred years. Hook is found in Old English, in the tenth century, with the same meaning that it has today. Crook comes into the language in the early thirteenth century, with a meaning very similar to hook. The sense used in shepherding can be traced from the early 1400s. All sorts of other meanings followed. The ‘criminal’ sense grew up in US slang towards the end of the nineteenth century. And in Australia and New Zealand, the word developed a general sense as an adjective meaning ‘bad’, ‘useless’, ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘malfunctioning’.

When I was last in Australia I didn’t feel so well at one point. Somebody said: ‘You feelin’ a bit crook?’ He was asking if I felt ill.

The most likely origin of by hook or by crook lies in a medieval countryside practice. The forests of medieval Britain belonged to the king, and trees could not be cut down without permission. The penalties were ferocious. So how would people get wood for their fires? They were allowed to use branches that had fallen on the ground. And they were also allowed to cut any dead wood from a tree if it could be reached with a shepherd’s crook or the hooked tool used by a reaper. The Bodmin Register of 1525 refers to local people being allowed to ‘bear away upon their backs a burden of lop, crop, hook, crook, and bag wood’.

If you go to the New Forest, you will see a plaque, the Rufus Stone, just off the A31 near Ringwood, marking the place where King William II was killed. There are clear signposts on the main road. Its inscription reads:

Here stood the oak tree on which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrrell at a stag glanced and struck King William II surnamed Rufus on the breast of which stroke he instantly died on the second day of August anno 1100. King William thus slain was laid on a cart belonging to one Purkess and drawn from hence to Winchester, and buried in the Cathedral Church of that City.

Nearby, in the Sir Walter Tyrrell pub, you can reflect on the fact that Purkess was rewarded with permission to gather all the wood he could reach ‘by hook or crook’. Several generations of the Purkess family are buried in the cemetery of All Saints Church in Minstead, and the Purkiss name is still known in the area.

If you visit the churchyard, prepare to be distracted by Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. Behind the church, under an oak, is the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

An Irish origin has also been claimed for the phrase. In 1170 Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, known as ‘Strongbow’, sailed into Waterford harbour as part of Henry II’s Irish campaign. He saw a tower on one side and a church on the other. On being told that it was the ‘Tower of Hook’ (in County Wexford) and the ‘Church of Crook’ (in County Waterford), he is reported to have said, ‘We shall take the town by Hook and by Crook.’ There are several variations of the story in Irish folklore. Cromwell is supposed to have said the same thing in 1650 when he was attacking Waterford.

I never got a chance to ask my Scottish-Welsh farmer if he had any opinions about the origins of by hook or by crook. My BBC producer, apparently sensing that something was not going as expected, appeared from within a flock of sheep-farmers. She had found somebody she wanted me to talk to. I thanked my friend for his company, and was just walking away from him when I felt my arm being tugged backwards. I looked down at it. There was a crook round it, holding it tight. I looked back at the farmer.

‘You should be interviewing the sheep, ye know,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘They don’t bleat the same down here as they do in Scotland.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Ay, it’s a Welsh accent, ye see.’