'Some sweryth armes, naylys, herte, and body,
Terynge our Lord worse than the Jowes hym arayed.'
And again (ii. 130) he complains of swearers who crucify Christ afresh,
swearing by 'his holy membres,' by his 'blode,' by 'his face, his herte, or
by his croune of thorne,' &c. See also the Ayenbite of Inwyt, p. 64;
Political, &c., Poems, ed. Furnivall, p. 193; Wyclif's Works, ed. Matthew,
pp. 60, 278, 499. Todd, in his Illustrations of Chaucer, p. 264, quotes
(from an old MS.) the old second commandment in the following form:--
'II. Thi goddes name and b[e]autte
Thou shalt not take for wel nor wo;
Dismembre hym not that on rode-tre
For the was mad boyth blak and blo.'
477. _tombesteres_, female dancers. 'Sir Perdicas, whom that kinge
Alysandre made to been his heire in Grece, was of no ki_n_ges blod; his
dame [_mother_] was a to_m_bystere'; Testament of Love, Book ii. ed. 1561,
fol. ccxcvi b.
_Tombestere_ is the feminine form; the A. S. spelling would be _tumbestre_;
the masc. form is the A. S. _tumbere_, which is glossed by _saltator_,
i. e. a dancer; the verb is _tumbian_, to dance, used of Herodias' daughter
in the A. S. version of Mark, vi. 22. The medieval idea of _tumbling_ was,
that the lady stood on her hands with her heels in the air; see Strutt,
Sports, &c. bk. iii. c. 5.
On the feminine termination _-ster_ (formerly _-estre_, or _-stre_) see the
remarks in Marsh's Lectures on the English Language, printed in (the
so-called) Smith's Student's Manual of the English Language, ed. 1862, pp.
207, 208, with an additional note at p. 217. Marsh's remarks are, in this
case, less clear than usual. He shews that the termination was not always
used as a feminine, and that, in fact, its force was early lost. It is,
however, merely a question of chronology. That the termination was
_originally_ feminine in Anglo-Saxon, is sufficiently proved by the A. S.
version of the Gospels. There we find the word _witega_ frequently used in
the sense of _prophet_; but, in one instance, where it is necessary to
express the _feminine_, we find this accomplished by the use of this very
termination. 'And anna waes _witegystre_ (another MS. _witegestre_)'; i. e.
and Anna was a _prophetess_, Luke, ii. 36. Similar instances might easily
be multiplied; see Dr. Morris's Hist. Outlines of Eng. Accidence, pp. 89,
90. Thus, _wasshestren_ (pl.) is used as the [277] translation of
_lotrices_; Old Eng. Homilies, ed. Morris, ii. 57. But it is also true
that, in the fourteenth century, the feminine force of this termination was
becoming very weak, so that, whilst in P. Plowman, B. v. 306, we find
'Beton the _brewestere_' applied to a female brewer, we cannot thence
certainly conclude that 'brewestere' was always feminine at that period. On
the other hand, we may point to one word, _spinster_, which has remained
feminine to this very day.
Dr. Morris remarks that _tombestere_ is a hybrid word; in which I believe
that he has been misled by the spelling. It is a pure native word, from the
A. S. _tumbian_, but the scribes have turned it from _tumbestere_ into
_tombestere_, by confusion with the French _tomber_. Yet even the Fr.
_tomber_ was once spelt _tumber_ (Burguy, Roquefort), being, in fact, a
word of Germanic origin. An acrobat can still be called a _tumbler_: we
find 'rope-dancers and _tumblers_' in Locke, Conduct of the Understanding,
§ 4. Indeed, the Cambridge MS. has here the true spelling _tumbesteris_,
whilst the Corpus, Petworth, and Lansdowne MSS. have the variations
_tomblisteres_ and _tomblesters_. The A. S. masc. form _tumbere_ occurs in
Ælfric's Vocabulary.
As to the _source_ of the suffix _-ster_, it is really a compound suffix,
due to composition of the Aryan suffixes _-es_ and _-ter-_; cf. Lat.
_mag-is-ter_, _min-is-ter_, _poet-as-ter_. The feminine use is peculiar to
Anglo-Saxon and to some other Teutonic languages.