A map of London showing the borough of Hackney in red
8 December 2020
(For the computing sense, see the hack / hacker entry.)
In present-day parlance, a hackney or hack is a taxi, and something that is hackneyed is trite and unoriginal. The word comes from Hackney, a borough of London a few miles north of the City of London.* Hackney was once marshland or wet meadow, grassland that was periodically flooded by the River Lea. In the medieval period, the area was often used as pastureland for London horses, especially those kept for hire. The placename means Haca’s island and comes from the Old English personal name Haca + ig (island, esp. fenland island), a reference to a dry area in the marshland.
In the earliest uses, a hackney is a light, riding horse, the kind that might be hired for a day’s travel, as opposed to a heavy war or farm horse. The earliest known appearance of hackney in this sense is actually in Latin. It appears in the accounts for the household of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, for 24 May 1299 to 7 June 1299. The word also appears in Anglo-Norman French, although this is a bit later than its appearance in English. Despite the first appearance in this Latin record, the word obviously first arose in English and this Latin citation is just the oldest to survive:
In expensis Lakoc cum uno hakeney conducto de Lond' usque Canterbire pro tapetis cariandis ii s.
(In expenses, Lakoc with one hired hackney from London up to Canterbury for a worn cloth, 2 shillings.)
Lakoc is undoubtedly the name of the person in the household who incurred the expense.
While the denotation of hackney here is horse, the context is that of a hired horse—conducto is an adjective meaning hired or leased. Other early uses are not in the context of a rental, but the association seems to have been there from the beginning.
The oldest known English use is from about the same time. It appears in the romance Bevis of Hampton, found in the Auchinleck manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1. The poem was written c. 1300 and the manuscript dates from c. 1330:
King Ermin seide in is sawe,
That ner no mesager is lawe,
To ride upon an hevi stede,
That swiftli scholde don is nede.
"Ac nim a lighter hakenai
And lef her the swerd Morgelai,
And thow schelt come to Brademonde
Sone withinne a lite stounde!"
Beves an hakenai bestrit
And in his wei forth a rit
And bereth with him is owene deth,
Boute God him helpe, that alle thing seth!(King Ermin said in his speech,
That no messenger is ever allowed
To ride upon a heavy steed,
Because it is necessary to ride swiftly.
“But take a lighter hackney
And leave here the sword Morgelai,
And you shall come to Brademonde
Soon within a little while!”
Bevis mounted a hackney
And he rode forth
And bears with him his own death,
Unless God, who sees all things, helps him.)
And we see the word again in the sense of a hired horse in the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, written c. 1390, San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 143:
Ac hakeneys hadde thei none bote hakeneys to huyre;
Thenne gan Gyle to borwen hors at many gret maystres
And shop that a shereue sholde bere Mede
Softliche in sambure fram syse to syse,
And Fals and Fauel fecche forth sysores
And ryde on hem and on reues righte faste by Mede.(But of hackneys they had nothing but hackneys for hire;
Then Giles went to borrow horses from many great masters
And arranged that a sheriff should bear Mede
Softly on a lady’s horse from assize to assize,
And Falsehood and Deceit fetched forth jurymen’s [horses]
And rode on them and on reeves’ [horses] very close to Mede.)
This sense of a hired horse would eventually transfer to a hired coach and later to a taxi, both horse-drawn and later automotive.
The clipping hack, meaning a hired coach or taxi appears in the early modern era. The Faversham Borough records of 1571 contain a reference to a hackeman. And Aphra Behn’s 1676 play The Town-Fopp contains a use of hack, meaning a hired coach:
But 'faith Sir, you're mistaken, her Fortune shall not go to the maintenance of your Misses, which being once sure of, she, poor Soul, is sent down to the Countrey house, to learn Housewifery, and live without Mankind, unless she can serve her self with the handsom Steward, or so—whil'st you tear it away in Town, and live like Man and Wife with your Jilt, and are every day seen in the Glass Coach, whil'st your own natural Lady is hardly worth the hire of a Hack.
As anyone who has ridden in a taxi can attest, hired horses, coaches, and cars are not always in the best condition. Continual use and mistreatment ages them before their time. So, it is only natural that hackney and hackneyed would come to mean old, tired, worn out. This adjectival sense dates to at least 1590 when it appears in a work by Richard Harvey, an astrologer and theologian known for his harsh critiques of those he disagreed with:
He is a boone companion for the nonce, a secrete fosterer of illegitimate corner conceptions, a graue orator for ruffianly purposes, a busie bookeman to helpe the sworde, a rebuker of play, and yet making a play of himselfe and all thinges, a rauening woolfe in sheepes wool, a bloudy massacrer and cutthroate in iesters apparrell, a poste vpon hackney sillogismes to haue silly ones geue him the way.
That’s how what was once an exurb of London became associated with trite and tired language.
* For those unfamiliar with the geography, the City of London or the City is the immediate environs around St. Paul’s Cathedral. Cities were once defined as the parish around a cathedral. The City of London is associated with St. Paul’s, the City of Westminster with Westminster Abbey, etc. What we today call London is much larger.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008, s.v. hakeney.
Behn, Aphra. The Town-Fopp (1676). London: T.N. for James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677, 8. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Harvey, Richard. A Theologicall Discourse of the Lamb of God. London: John Windet for W. Ponsonby, 1590, 119. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Herzman, Ronald B., Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. “Bevis of Hampton.” Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997, lines 1251–62.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman (C Text, 2008). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool U Press, 2014, 75, lines 2.178–83 (3.175–80 in Skeat’s edition).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hakenei(e, n.
Mills, A.D. A Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 152.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. hackney, n. and adj., hack, n.2.
Woolgar, C.M. Household Accounts from Medieval England, vol. 1 of 2. Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 17. Oxford: Oxford UP for the British Academy, 1992, 166. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: Nilfanion, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.