David Scott-Macnab* Middle English Counter-Rivere DOI 10.1515/anglia-2016-0070 Abstract: The Middle English compound noun counter-rivere – attested as coun- terreuere in the MED, and as counter reuer, cownter reuer, cownteryuer, cowntre ryver in all known manuscripts – is glossed by the MED s.v. contrevure n., (b) as denoting ‘a contrivance of some sort’ employed in the sport of hawking. The MED offers no definitive etymology, but invites readers to compare the word with Old French controvëure ‘invention’, which does indeed fit well with the citation supplied for sense (a) ‘a stratagem’. 1 Without wishing to challenge the MED’s lemma or its treatment of that word under sense (a), I argue that its interpretation of the technical hawking term under sense (b) is mistaken, and that it has erroneously conflated two entirely different lexical items. Close examination of the contexts in which counter-rivere occurs will confirm that the word needs to be lemmatised separately with a gloss indicating that it denotes a specific type of hawking assistant, and that it has roots (hitherto unrecognised) going back to Anglo-Latin. 1 Avant-Propos Some of the terminology used in this article when discussing hawks and falcons, and the sport of flying them, often elicits queries, which I hope to forestall by means of the following prefatory remarks. While practices can vary according to time and place, it remains broadly the case that the terms hawk, hawker, and hawking have, in English, long been used both, specifically, for ‘true’ (‘short-winged’) hawks – such as the goshawk and the sparrowhawk – as well as, generically, for virtually any raptor used for sport. By contrast, the semantically related terms falcon, falconer, and falconry always refer specifically to ‘long-winged hawks’– such as the peregrine, the lanner, and the gyrfalcon – and the sport of flying them. In this article, I give preference to the *Corresponding author: David Scott-Macnab, University of Johannesburg E ˗ Mail: dscott-macnab@uj.ac.za 1 Cf. DMF, s.vv. controuveur subst. masc.; contreuve subst. fém.; AND, s.v. controvure s. ‘creation, fabrication’. Anglia 2016; 134(4): 604–616 Authenticated | dscott-macnab@uj.ac.za author's copy Download Date | 11/7/16 6:39 PM