Thomas Beddoes to the Editor of The Monthly Magazine, 4 October 1799
Sir
If you think the following communication may meet the taste of some of your readers, I shall be obliged to you for inserting it in your Magazine.
Those who concur with the author of The Diversions of Purley, respecting the original meaning of the word more, may be led like myself to believe the word reckon has a similar original meaning.
Raked hay, is hay put together in a heap; hence hay-rick.
Reek in German, signifies any heap.
To reckon is put together, to calculate. Chaucer writes.—‘Than cometh negligence or retchelesness, that recketh of nothynge.’ The Parson’s Tale.
With the same meaning are used at present in the North, rackless and rack. Vide Grose’s Glossary.
To wreke, meaning to revenge, seems to me the same word. – Chaucer thus uses it,
Well couth love him wreke tho’
Of daunger and of pride also,
That Narcissus sometyme him bere,
He quite him wel his guerdon there.
The Romaunt of the Rose.
Here love could reckon the daunger and the pride of Narcissus—to quite or repay him, as much.—So in common language, a person indebted to another, says, he is come to reckon with him, when he means to pay him.—Well would it be for mankind, if revenge were never pursued farther than to be even with the injuries received.
It is, perhaps, vain of me to ask indulgence towards a conjecture on a subject so little attended to as this, respecting the meaning of words; the readers indifference may secure to me a quiet possession of any error I may commit; but I should rather meet a correction of the error, than add one more to those already heaped on language; besides my overthrow must prove that the great, and the only exemplar of all rational inquiry into the nature and progress of language, was studied; I mean the Diversions of Purley, the only guide to a knowledge of the English language.
My conjecture is, that the word rich, comes from the same source as reckon.
Wreck, is used in the north to mean abundance. Vide Grose’s Glossary.
Rich I suppose the past participle, and that a riked or a rich man was once possessed of much land produce; as a monied man, now signifies a man possessed of much money. – I need not adduce proof of the scarcity of coin in former periods, compared with its present abundance; the history of England abounds with striking facts of it; from this scarcity of it, it is not too much to conclude, that coin was unknown in the concerns of mankind, and that then the abundance of land produce constituted riches.—If this be true, it affords an example of a word which includes in its meaning the same conclusion, which the author of the Wealth of Nations has made, viz. that riches or wealth is derived from the soil.
Bath. M.D.
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My correspondent’s proofs appear to me cogent; and if he has not arrived at the truth, (which I by no means say) he has, I think, approached it as nearly as investigations of this kind admit. It will occur, that rick was not sounded soft by our ancestors; so that rick and rich were sounded alike. – In German, reich means rich and realme. In other northern languages, orthography favours the above deduction. – I hope the ingenious author will communicate more of his researches. To counteract the labours of those lexicographers, who have so continually ‘divorced the soul of a word from its body,’ is the best way I know, to elucidate language.
4th October, 1799.
T. Beddoes.
P. S. I have not met with reck in German for heap. My knowledge of that language, however, is not critical. Rechen is to rake; rech-gras, couch-grass. I suppose the rech in the latter compound signifies a heap or tuft.
Published: The Monthly Magazine, 8 (November 1799), 770