How birds got human names

Magpie is short for "Margaret Pie" and I swear I'm not even joking

I was recently extremely enthused to learn that a fair few birds’ common names originated as human names. Magpies were originally known simply as “pies” until the nickname “Mag”, short for Maggie, short for Margaret was added to the front sometime in the Middle Ages. Before it began to be treated as a single word, it was rendered as “Mag Pie”, a sort of fanciful full name for the creature. I tried to tell this to a friend and he refused to believe me (I think he still doesn’t) but the provenance is quite clear: pie originated from the Latin name for the bird, pica. You may have heard pica used to describe the human disorder of consuming inedible substances, which comes from the magpie’s reputation as an indiscriminate eater. The English form of pie (sans mag) is still preserved in the term piebald, a descriptor for any animal with a splotchy dark-on-white coat. In Middle English, piebald literally meant something like “magpie-spotted”.

The same type of thing happened to the daw, who was eventually christened with the proper name of Jack Daw. Mr Robin Redbreast doesn’t even get the courtesy of a full name these days, and as far as I can tell the various Martins (house Martin, sand Martin, and so on) have always just been “Martin”.

So, why give birds human names in the first place? One thing to bear in mind is that historically, lots of animals have had generic names—think of Fido and Rex for dogs, for instance. Historically, such names were quite common, though many have gone by the wayside now. I have already written about the famous legendary horse Fauvel, whose name was a standard one given to dun-coloured horses in the Middle Ages. In a nice little article about medieval pet names, Medievalists.net cite Kathleen Walker-Meikle’s great work on pets of yore, pointing out that in England, Gyb, short for Gilbert was a generic name for a tomcat, while in France monkeys tended to be called Robert and parrots Pierrot.

While most of these names were applied to house pets, there is plenty of evidence showing how generic names were applied to wild birds such as the pie and the daw. In 1679, as part of an elaborate ploy to fabricate a Papist plot to kill the king, English Baptist priest Titus Oates published a lengthy scree against Catholics, including a fervent attack on their doctrine surrounding the properties of the Eucharist. The story of Oates’ life of fraud, villainy, and alleged sodomy is actually quite entertaining and I highly recommend looking through this extremely damning biography by one of his contemporaries, but for now let’s focus on the birds.

Oates’ first gripe with how Catholics view the Eucharist is that if the communion bread is all that holy, then the wafers perchance being eaten by a bird or worm would be an extreme theological crisis that would shake the very foundations of the Church’s doctrine. I’m not a theologist or a Christian, so I don’t know if Oates’ argument holds much water (I suspect not), but I am attaching an exerpt from it nonetheless because he does refer to each animal by a generic human name: the pie is Mag Pie, the daw is Jack Daw, the sparrow is Philip Sparrow, and the worm, charmingly, is William Worm.

And methinks that the Prayer of the Popish Priest is very large, in that he desireth of God, that as many as taste of that conjured Bread may receive health both of Body and Soul. What if Mag Pie,or Jack Daw,or Philip Sparrow, should chance to eat of it, as it may happen (hath it not been known that the little god of the Altar hath been eaten and devoured of Mother Mouse and Will. Worm) should they also, through the tasting and eating thereof, receive health and salvation both of body and soul? A foul and a great oversight.

While the magpie and jackdaw have kept their human nicknames into the present day, Philip Sparrow hasn’t been so lucky. In fact, almost every bird used to have a nickname of this sort that has long since fallen out of common use. In the UK, you might still hear the names “Jenny Wren”, “Tom Tit”, and “Jack Snipe”, but these are just a drop in the bucket of what used to be. This 1886 compendium of British and Irish bird folk names and folk lore attests to that. Have a look through, and you’ll see that most birds have a number of regional names, with some species racking up dozens.

A non-comprehensive list of what some birds were known as in various regions:

• The whitethroat was Charlie Muftie, Peggy Cut-throat, Blethering Tam, and Great Peggy

• The arctic skua was Dirty Allen

• The storm petrel was Martin Oil

• The hooded crow was Harry Dutchman and Royston Dick

• The great titmouse was Black-headed Bob and Joe Ben

• The pied wagtail was Wilie Wagtail, Peggy Dishwasher, and Molly Washdish (the latter two from the way its characteristic tail-wagging stirs up the water as it hunts for aquatic insects)

• The missel thrush was Norman Thrush and Big Mavis

• The heron was Jenny Longlegs, Craigie Heron, Jack Hern, and apparently also simply “Ralph”

• The ringed plover was Dull Willy and Dot Plover

• Jenny Wren was among the birds with the most aliases: her epithets included Pudding Poke, Titmeg, Tiddleope, Juggy Wren, Titty Todger, and Stumpy Dick.

Some of these epithets drew on stereotypes about certain human names. Today, Karen has become synonymous with a certain type of nagging woman and, here in the UK, Barry calls to mind the image of a man who’s a sort of red-faced, spherical booze-swiller. 500 years ago, Mag was a common generic name for a chattering, gossipy woman, Robin was a charming nickname for little boys, and Jack was associated with mischievous men (I would argue it still is today! Think of how many dashing rogues of literature and cinema are named Jack).

Other folk names didn’t include human names and instead were purely descriptive, based either on the bird’s behaviour or on folk beliefs about it. There are so many funny ones that I would feel quite bad not sharing a few:

• The long-tailed titmouse was the bum towel, nimble tailor, and ragamuffin

• The chaffinch was the charbob, wet bird, scobby, and pinkety

• The yellowhammer was the cheeser, or in parts of Scotland, where it was apparently not held in high regard, the skite (=shite)

• The bittern was the butter bump, bitter bum, bog bumper, bottle bump, and bumble

Perhaps the most baffling, though, was the common Kestrel. He was known simply as the Windfucker.¹

Though not all of these names are flattering to the birds, I find all of them quite endearing. Either way, it makes me happy to read about these names, especially living in a time when few people take the time to notice birds, let alone name them. It speaks to a sense of closeness that our ancestors felt to our little feathered neighbours that they greeted the birds like old friends :)

1. It is tempting to think this might be a relic of some sort of hatred toward the poor kestrel, but some scholars have suggested that fuck used to simply mean “to strike or beat”, thus a sensible description for the kestrel with its large, powerful wings. At any rate, if the name wasn’t vulgar at the start of its existence, it was by the end. In the 1622 play The Birth of Merlin, the titular character is insulted thus: “Yes, and a Goshawk was his father, for ought we know, for I am sure his mother was a Wind-fucker.”