Roman jackknife (left) with its wooden handle rotted away, found at Gellep, Germany, and a modern reconstruction next to it
23 February 2021
A jackknife is a clasp knife, one where the blade folds into the handle. Clasp knives have been around since antiquity, but the term jackknife dates to the mid seventeenth century and arose in the north of England or in Scotland. The word is clearly a compound of Jack + knife, but why the word Jack was chosen is uncertain. There are two contending theories, one that is favored by present-day dictionaries and an older one that is now less favored but cannot be ruled out.
The favored explanation is that it comes from a blend of jack of the leg or jack of the leg. Clasp knives are, to this day, known as jocktelegs in the north of England and Scotland. The jack is from the use of that word to denote a generic man, and the leg is thought to refer to the fact that the handles of such knives were often carved in shape a human leg. To this day, jambette (little leg) is used in dialectal French to refer to a clasp knife.
The second explanation is that it comes from the name of a seventeenth-century Flemish maker of knives, Jacques de Liège. The very existence of such a cutler is disputed, but there is evidence of clasp knives bearing his or a similar name once existed. Jacques de Liège could easily become Jack the Leg in the mouths of non-French speakers.
The earliest known appearance of a form of jackknife or jockteleg is in an inventory of the wares of the late merchant William Mackerrell of Newcastle upon Tyne conducted on 13 November 1642:
a dozen Jackalegg knives 1[£] 1[s.] 6[d.]
The next year, an Edinburgh legal document (Edinburgh Testaments 40.233) has:
Auchteine jackteleges at ix s. the peice, […] Elevin vther blak knyfes of that samyn sort
And jockteleg may be familiar to non-Scots speakers through the poetry of Robert Burns, who used the word several times in his poetry. For example, from his “On the Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland,” about the antiquarian and lexicographer of slang:
Forbye, he’ll shape you aff fu’gleg
The cut of Adam’s philibeg;
The knife that nicket Abel’s craig
He’ll prove you fully,
It was a faulding jocteleg,
Or lang-kail gullie.(Besides, he’ll tailor you off very quickly
The cut of Adam’s kilt;
The knife that nicked Abel’s throat
He will prove to you fully,
It was a folding jockteleg,
Or a long cabbage knife.)
The form jack knife appears in the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 7 December 1683. The minutes of a subcommittee meeting from that day read:
Ordered Mr. Sam Banner provide 1000 hatchetts for Porte Nellson thus Sorted
500 large
250 Middle
250 SmallLikwise Knives thus sorted
1800 Long Knives large box hartes
900 long Small Knives Ditto
1000 Rochbury large Ditto
500 Ditto Small Ditto
1000 Jack KnivesAnd have Agreed wth. him for the prices following
large hatchetts 14d.
Small Ditto 10d.
Middle Ditto 12d.
Jack Knives 2 1/2 s. p. Do.
Rochbury large 2s 8d. p. Doz.
Ditto Small 22d. p. Do.
Long Knives large 2s. 9d. p. Do.
Ditto Small 2s. 2d. p. Do.a Sample of the Jack Knives was now Delivered him Marked wth. the flower Deluce att one End of the Letters and the harte att the Other End of the Letters wch. are
I A C Q U E G I N E R
And the minutes of the full committee meeting later that day read:
Ordered Mr. Samll. Banner put the marke of a Lyon and owne Name upon the Jack knives
Here we have the first evidence of a cutler by the name of Jacques. The English company ordered its supplier to rebrand the knives, making them appear more English and less French, by removing the name Jacques Giner and the fleur-de-lis, replacing them with the supplier’s name and the image of a lion.
Early commentary on the etymology was dominated by this explanation. David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes) in his Scottish glossary of c.1776 wrote of jockteleg:
The etymology of this word remained unknown till not many years ago an old knife was found having this inscription Jacques de Liege, the name of the cutler
And in his 1864 Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers, Samuel Smiles says the word is:
merely a corruption of Jacques de Liege, a famous foreign cutler, whose knives were as well known throughout Europe as those of Rogers or Mappin are now.
The entry for 21 June 1671 in The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston reads:
for a Jock the Leg knife 00[£] 8[s.] 0[d.]
To which the editor A.W.C. Hallen notes:
A common name for a clasp-knife made originally at Sheffield by Jacques de Liège, a Fleming.
But in the twentieth century, doubt was cast on the Jacques de Liège explanation and the idea that the knife is so named because its handle was often carved in the shape of a leg became the favored one. A June 1933 article about an auction of a knife collection in the magazine The Connoisseur disparages the Jacques de Liège explanation:
Somerville persists in terming these folding travellers' knives jocktelegs, so- called, according to him, after "John of Liege, the most celebrated cutler in that city in the century before last (i.e., the seventeenth century), and the inventor of that species of manufacture." David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, or one of his archaeological friends, was apparently responsible for the existence of this Jacques de Liège. His name had been found, so he asserted, on an old knife but no trace of this cutler is discoverable in that city. Samuel Smiles did not hesitate, however, to accept him as a distinguished cutler "whose knives were as well known throughout Europe, as those of Rogers or Mappin are now " And Hallen, in his notes to The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, went one better when he asserted that these knives were "made originally at Sheffield by Jacques de Liège, a Fleming.
Hailes, it would appear, was having his leg pulled by some ingenious friend with more imagination than honesty. Jocktele—on the analogy of Jockteleear (Jock the liar), a small almanack full of unreliable statements—is probably Jock the leg, a clasp knife of which the haft was fashioned as a human leg. These jambettes, with which, among "autres raretez de cette nature" [other rarities of this nature], one of Madame de Maintenon's earliest lovers sought to win her complaisance, and the later and better made couteaux à jambe de Princesse [princess-leg knives], described and illustrated by Perret, were to be found in every country in Europe. Sometimes the limb represented on surviving specimens is that of a man of fashion; sometimes that of a country bumpkin; most often it is the stockinged and gartered extremity of one of the fair sex. Frequently they were adorned with mottoes of a far from improving character. One in the British Museum bears the inoffensive legend:—
HEAR IS A LEG AND FOOT
AND A GOOD BLADE TOOT.
But the Jacques de Liège explanation should not be dismissed so easily. There is early evidence, as seen in the Hudson’s Bay Company records, that clasp knives from such a manufacturer did in fact exist. While the evidence is somewhat sketchy, it is there.
Jackknife is also used figuratively to refer something that bends back on itself. Its use as a verb to refer to a vehicle turning so that it doubles back on its trailer in a vee-shape dates to 1886, originally referring to a cart pulled by an animal, but now used chiefly of trucks pulling a semi-trailer. And it’s use as a type of dive in the pike position dates to 1906.
Sources:
Beard, Charles R. “Fiske Collection for Sheffield.” The Connoisseur, 91.382, June 1933, 389. ProQuest Magazines.
Burns, Robert. “On the Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland.” Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, vol. 2 of 2. Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1797, 222. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language, 2021, s.v. jockteleg, n., Jackteleg, n.
Hallen, A.W. Cornelius, ed. “Ane Account of Depursements Begun 1671 1 De[cembe]r,” The Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, 1671–1707. Publications of the Scottish Historical Society 16. Edinburgh: University Press, 1894, 6. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. jackknife, n., jackknife, v., jockteleg, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jockteleg.
Rich, E.E. Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company 1679–1984, Second Part, 1682–84. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1946, 171–72.
Smiles, Samuel. Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields: 1864. 133. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Spufford, Margaret. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. London: Hambledon Press, 1984, 188. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Jeroen Zuiderwijk, 2006, public domain image.