One for Sorrow (12 page)

Numerous version of this intriguing saying exist, the earliest – ‘Hares can gambol over the body of a lion' is cited by some sources as being among the proverbs coined, or at least collected by the Roman aphorist Publilius Syrus in his
Sententiae
in the first century
bc
. Other Latin versions exist – ‘Even a hare will insult a dead lion', for example–though the first record of anything similar in English is from George Pettie's 1586 translation of Stefano Guazzo's work on Italian manners,
The Civil Conversation
, which includes the lines: ‘Of these this saying rose, That the lion being dead, the verie hares triumph ouer him.'
    Hares are known for their timidity and this phrase was used as a way of criticizing a particular kind of cowardice that paraded as bravery. It was used against people who waited for a powerful adversary to have been fatally weakened before daring to attack them; comparing them to hare who would flee from the slightest sound but will taunt a fearsome lion after its death.
    The hare's triumph over a lion represented a worthless victory and the phrase was used to shame anyone who tried to claim bravery when their opponent, however powerful they might once have been, has lost that power. It was in this context that Shakespeare used the phrase in
King John
in 1596: ‘You are the hare of whom the proverb goes, Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.'

   

Most of us know someone who likes to sound off at full volume whenever they judge that something hasn't been done in exactly the way they would have done it. Often, these people sound fairly menacing while they're in full flow, but they're usually the least likely of our acquaintances to actually put their words into actions. In other words, their bark is worse than their bite – this this contemporary-sounding saying comes from the older proverb ‘Barking dogs seldom bite', which in turn has its roots in the legends of the third century.
    A Middle English translation of a Greek text on the escapades of Alexander the Great called
Historia Alexandri Magni
, which became so popular in fourteenth-century Britain that Chaucer mentioned it in
The Canterbury Tales
, says this of a dog:

Bot as bremely [fiercely] as he baies
[barks
]
, he bitis never the faster.

The message must have rung true with English readers because by 1684 a more familiar version of the phrase appeared in John Bodenham's
Politeuphuia, or Wits Common-Wealth
: ‘A dog that barketh much will bite little.'
    Dogs were bred by the aristocracy in the seventeenth century for hunting and every nobleman kept at least one pack. Peasants couldn't afford to keep dogs as working animals or pets but semi-domesticated dogs lived alongside villagers, so the phrase's metaphorical usefulness for describing belligerent human beings would have been universally understood.

This old adage was first recorded in Howell's
Paramoigraphy
(Proverbs) in 1659, though it's one of the many country sayings that is likely to have been passed on by word of mouth for years prior to its appearance in print. It was used to express the view that it was better to have something for certain than to wait for something of greater value but which was not yet in your grasp. (See also
‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush'
)
    These days we often use the saying in reverse – ‘Better a hen tomorrow than an egg today', a switch that relates to our relative prosperity. Though chicken appears in many recipes that have survived from the Middle Ages, it was primarily in dishes that would have been eaten by the upper classes. In more modest homes chicken was eaten rarely, while eggs were an essential ingredient of a rustic diet. Peasant families would have eaten a bird only once its laying days were definitely over; partly because in the days before artificial incubation, the odds of getting a hen from an egg probably seemed stacked against you. You needed a virile rooster; a broody mother hen who would sit for long enough for the egg's temperature to be maintained; humidity levels had to be spot on and if it did hatch, there had to be enough grain to feed the chick with. It's not hard to see why, with hungry mouths to feed, the egg today seemed a sensible option.

   

Parsley was introduced into England from Sardinia in the sixteenth century and was regarded with some suspicion as a result of its resemblance to a poisonous native plant known as fool's parsley, or dog parsley, which could be deadly if eaten.
    This saying may well have referred originally to this dangerous variety of the plant, which was similar to hemlock. Wariness of the herb allowed numerous superstitions to attach themselves to it; it was considered very unlucky to give or receive a sprig of parsley as a gift. Transplanting the plant was thought to invite bad luck, or a death in the family, and if a stranger was allowed to plant parsley in the garden, whoever owned the land could expect trouble ahead.
    There were also myths that related specifically to parsley's affect on women. It was said that young women who sowed its seeds would soon have a child, but that if the leaves were eaten they could prevent pregnancy. It was also said by some that, like hemlock, which was used in spells, only witches could grow it. This last belief may have been the at the root of this phrase. Medieval public opinion (and indeed law) was shaped by the Church and the aristocracy, both of whom agreed that women should have few rights and be subservient to men. Women who broke this mould were often branded witches; in the Middle Ages, for the mistress to be the master of her home would have been seen as a very bad thing.

Cats and mice feature frequently in folklore, providing a domestic scale representation of the classic adversarial relationship between a hunter and its prey. In feudal times the villeins and serfs would have identified with the mice, living under the watchful eye of the lord, who was their provider but also their enemy since he had almost complete control over their lives. This saying was a warning against taking an unnecessary risk by putting themselves in close proximity to a powerful enemy. It appeared in print with this definition in George Herbert's
Outlandish Proverbs
in 1639 and served as a warning to keep your head down and do as little as possible to draw the attention of your rival.
    The phrase was given a huge boost in popularity in 1931 when it was one of the often used proverbs recited by the fictional Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan in
Charlie Chan Carries On
. The film of the book by American writer Earl Derr Biggers was a huge hit, it told of a series of murders aboard a cruise ship and included a scene in which Chan commented on the strangeness of the murderer staying on board by using the pseudo-Chinese proverb: ‘Only very brave mouse makes nest in cat's ear.'

This proverb was recorded for the first time in print in Thomas Fuller's collection of idioms
Gnomologia
(1732) as ‘Many Things grow in the Garden, that were never sow'd there'. At the time, the gardens of grand, stately homes were moving away from the formal French designs that had dominated the Renaissance period towards a more natural, less cultivated style. Influential garden designers like William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown were guiding the aristocracy towards creating gardens that brought the natural world to their doors, rather than providing them with a neatly ordered refuge from it. But although this natural look was carefully planned in the grand gardens of the rich, the country gardens of the early eighteenth century were genuinely shaped by nature. Most people living in the countryside grew vegetables in small kitchen gardens, but in the days before chemical weed killer, countless unplanned plants would have sprung up every year. Weeds like shepherd's purse, fat hen or goosefoot, cleaver, speedwell and hairy bittercress all disperse their seeds by wind, which meant that they could spread from uncultivated land into gardens on the breeze.
    But country gardeners wouldn't have expected otherwise and this understanding that unplanned plants would appear in their gardens taught them to expect the unexpected, which is the broader meaning of this phrase.

   

This mercenary message has its origins in medieval marriage, when love was rarely the driving force behind a match. A similar idea is described in William Caxton's 1474 translation of a thirteenth-century Italian political treatise, which used chess pieces as an allegory for a society. Caxton's version says:

Herof men saye a comyn prouerbe in englond that loue lastest as longe as the money endurith.

The proverb seems to have referred to relationships between members of the upper classes, where there was money to endure. While little was done to hide the fact it was business, rather than mutual affection, that determined who married whom, the twelfth century had seen the birth of the notion of courtly love, which although unlinked to marriage, did introduce the idea of love as something to be aspired to.
    The exact phrase is described as an old maxim in
The English Gentlewoman,
by wealthy country gent Richard Brathwaite, published in 1631, which advised respectable women on how to behave. In this case it required them to guard against allowing this proverb to prove true if their own husbands lost their fortunes, in which circumstances the ladylike thing would be to honour and obey him regardless.
    Nowadays the phrase is somewhat outdated but it is still occasionally used by members of the older generations to warn youngsters against getting married before they've established themselves with a way of earning a living, or as an arch way of passing judgement on celebrity couples whose relationships come to an end the moment one of their stars begins to fade.