Words are now the tools of my trade, so they interest me. Claire and I visited the Weald and Downland Living Museum on Sunday, with our friends Angie and Frank. The museum was fabulous. It was wonderful seeing how people lived in Tudor times. I undertake a lot of research to try and get my historical facts right, but there’s nothing quite like walking through the buildings of the time.
In one of the 16th century houses there was a particularly informative volunteer who told us about the scullery and buttery. The photograph on the left is the scullery, and the one on the right is the buttery. There is a hemispherical copper bowl in the scullery, with a fireplace beneath it. He explained that scullery derives from the Latin scutella meaning drinking bowl. Water would be constantly on the boil for washing dishes or clothes, brewing, or bathing.
He also explained that the buttery had nothing to do with making butter. A butt is a cask of around 478 litres. It was the largest cask that would fit through a typical doorway at the time. The buttery was where these casks of ale or wine were stored. I should have known that it was nothing to do with butter, because the buttery at my old college, St. Edmund Hall, is the bar. I’ve spent a lot of time in there, over the years.
It seems to me that if scutella means drinking bowl, then that’s probably where we get skull from. Our skulls are rather bowl shaped, from the eye sockets up, anyway. However the OED tells me that skull comes from Middle English scolle; of unknown origin. I’m sure the OED know their stuff, but I would have thought there was a connection. I shall chose my words even more carefully in the next Sir Anthony Standen Adventure.