Extract
THE Oxford English Dictionary’s basic definition of the now all but obsolete word scullion is ‘a domestic servant of the lowest rank in a household who performed the menial offices of the kitchen’. The first written attestation is from the 1480s, which may account for the tentative tone of the proposed etymology: ‘Perh. an alteration of F[rench] souillon scullion, due to assimilation to scullery’.1 Before pursuing this tentative French source, we may note that the cross-reference to scullery leads to such further interesting words as squiller, ‘a maker or seller of dishes’ and ‘a servant having charge of the scullery’. Yet there is no explicit association in the dictionary of squiller and scullion. We might imagine, from this juxtaposition, that in a large household the former supervised the latter.
The semantics of French souillon link it to the verb souillir ‘to soil, befoul’. It is not found in continental French with the meaning ‘kitchen servant’, more specifically ‘one who washes dishes’, until 1530.2 Early use of souillon and related forms such as souillart, -ard point more towards slovenliness of personal habit than to kitchen duties that might entail dirty objects or getting dirty onself. Yet souillard (but not souillon) is represented in the French of Britain, as documented in one of the French translations of the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle: ‘si vous soffrez danger de [S]uillard le quistron, le garsçoun le qu qe lave les esqueles en la cusyne’.3 The antecedent phrasing in the English manuscript tradition that the translator is judged to have followed would have been close to ‘ef
e þolieð danger of Sluri þe cokes cneaue, þe wescheð ant wipeð disches i cuchene’.4 The future anchoresses are encouraged to suffer gladly the annoyances of the cook’s boy, for whom we have three descriptors: a nickname, Sluri in English, Suillard in French (perhaps Grubby in modern English); the synthetic French term quistron and its more analytic English counterpart, cokes cneaue; and explanatory phrases in both languages identifying his duties as dish-washing. I return to both quistron and cook’s knave below.
