91Èȱ¬

Several of our common phrases or sayings have a Welsh origin. Welsh rabbit - or Welsh rarebit as it is known when served in posh restaurants - is, of course, melted cheese on toast, the cheese sometimes being mixed with eggs, milk and ale.

The dish dates from the sixteenth century when only rich landowners could afford to eat deer or birds from the Welsh game preserves. Many ordinary Welsh people were never able to taste delicacies such as rabbit in their entire lives. But they could afford cheese on toasted bread and jokingly referred to it as their Welsh rabbit. The term stuck.

Those same huge estates also gave us the saying "to eat humble pie." The rich squires and landowners ate the flesh of the deer they had hunted and disdainfully threw away the innards, the 'umbles as they were known, the liver, kidneys and so on. The poor took those 'umbles, baked them into a pie and so "ate 'umble pie." Over the centuries the letter h has been added to the word and it has come to mean admitting inferiority.

The phrase "spooning" dates from sixteenth century Wales when men courting young girls would have to sit under the watchful eye of the family. While sitting there, undoubtedly bored and fed up, they would carve a wooden spoon, complete with intricate patterns, which would be presented to the girl on the wedding day. Thus the and the term "spooning" came into existence.

One symbol, not a phrase but a gesture, that was always thought to originate with the Welsh has little credibility - which is sad, as it remains a good story. Welsh archers, particularly those from Monmouth, were considered to be the best in the world. The French, with whom the Hundred Years War was being fought, feared their accuracy. To keep captured prisoners was both time consuming and expensive as they had to be guarded and fed.

So when the French captured a Welsh archer they simply cut off the first two fingers of the hand that drew the bowstring and then sent the mutilated archer back to the English forces where such wounded men would be useless.

After the Battle of Agincourt, runs the story, the Welsh archers simply stood on a mound and waved their two fingers at the French prisoners in a gesture of defiance and, of course, as a warning. Unfortunately, the story has little substance.

Although the gesture, the V sign, has been identified on the Macclesfield Psalter of 1330 and, according to some writers from the time, even though Henry V referred to the French practice of cutting off the fingers of soldiers in his pre-battle speech before Agincourt, there is no evidence that such mutilation was ever carried out. Nor does anyone record the Welsh archers waving their two fingers in the air as a gesture of defiance.

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