Phone box in Holt Forest, Dorset, England
23 October 2024
Holt, a word for a wooded area, a copse, goes back to Old English. Its root is common Germanic, with cognates found in Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and others.
The word appears in Beowulf when the hero’s men abandon him when faced with the dragon:
Nealles him on heape handgesteallan,
æðelinga bearn ymbe gestodon
hildecystum, ac hy on holt bugon,
ealdre burgan.
(His companions in the company, sons of nobles, did not at all stand by him valorously, by they fled into the holt to save their lives.)
But perhaps the most famous appearance of the word is in opening lines of General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and its description of spring:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
—So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
(When April with its showers sweet
The drought of March has pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such liquid
By which is engendered the vitality of the flower;
When Zephyr also with his sweet breath
Has in every holt and heath breathed life into
Tender buds, and the young Sun
Has in Aries run half its course,
And small birds make melodies,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
—So Nature goads them in their hearts—
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To distant shrines, known in sundry lands;
And especially from every shire’s end
Of England to Canterbury they go,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
Who helped them when they were sick.)
In the modern period, holt developed another sense, that of a wooded hill. This probably developed from poetic descriptions of copses in highland regions. For instance, we see this use of highest holts in a poem by George Turberville published in 1567:
What Tongue can tell the wo?
what Pen expresse the plaint?
Vnlesse the Muses helpe at néede
I féele my wits to faint.
Yée that frequent the hilles
and highest Holtes of all,
Assist mée with your skilfull Quilles
and listen when I call.
But another of Turberville’s poems in the same collection uses holt in the sense of a wooded area, so when he wrote highest holts, the holt isn’t a hill, but a woods on a high hill:
For water slipped by
may not be callde againe:
And to reuoke forepassed howres
were labour lost in vaine.
Take time whilst time applies
with nimble foote it goes:
Nor to compare with passed Prime
thy after age suppoes.
The holtes that now are hoare,
both bud and bloume I sawe.
And by the mid-eighteenth century, the sense of holt as the hill itself was clearly established, as we can see from John Dyer’s use of craggy holt in his 1757 poem The Fleece:
High Cotswold also ’mong the shepherd swains
Is oft remember’d, though the greedy plough
Preys on its carpet: He, whose rustic muse
O’er heath and craggy holt her wing display’d,
And sung the bosky bourns of Alfred’s shires,
Has favour’d Cotswold with luxuriant praise.
It's worth noting, however, that in Old Icelandic holt meant both a woods and a stony hill or ridge. Iceland isn’t known for its trees, and it seems likely that the word changed in this language because there wasn’t much call for words meaning a wooded area. It is most likely that this parallel semantic development is unconnected to the one in English, but the possibility of an Icelandic influence on English usage cannot be completely discounted.
There is another holt, spelled and pronounced the same but with an entirely different meaning and origin. It is a variant of hold, meaning a fortress or refuge, as in stronghold, but referring to an animal’s den, particularly the den of an otter. This sense dates to the late sixteenth century. From Thomas Cockaine’s 1591 A Short Treatise on Hunting:
An Otter sometimes will be trayled a mile or two before he come to the holt where he lyeth, and the earnestness of the sporte beginneth not till he be found, at which time some must runne up the water, some downe to see where he beats, and so pursue him with great earnestness till bee he kild.
(The use of beat here is in a hunting sense meaning to attempt to escape, especially along a stream or river.)
Sources:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.1–18. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. holt, n.
Dyer, John. The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757, lines 2.381–86, 65.
Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 2596–99a, 89.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. holt, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. holt, n.1.
Turberville, George. Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets. London: Henry Denham, 1567, 56, 33. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Zoëga, Geir. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910), University of Toronto Press, 2004, s.v. holt, n.
Photo credit: Toby, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.