Words We Use: Barn-gun

Barn-gun is an old word for that nasty disease, shingles. It is found mainly in the southwest of England, in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and it has escaped to be used in the English of south Wexford. The distinguished 19th-century folklorist Patrick Kennedy has it from there, his native place. In Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, written in Devon in 1869, there is this: “’Thou art not come to me,’ she said, looking through my simple face as if it were but glass, ‘to be struck for bone-shave, nor to be blessed for barn-gun.’” The English Dialect Dictionary has this from west Somerset: “They sez how tis the barney-gun, but I sure you I ’ant got no paice with un [ie my husband] day nor night, he’s proper rompin like.”

Barn-gun was feared in the old days. From Devon the EDD reported that “it is a common but unfounded belief, that if the extremities of the zone [of barn-gun] meet, the patient will certainly perish.” Barn is from the Old English beornan, to burn. Gun is the same word as gound, the yellow secretion in the corners of the eyes, from Old English gund, matter, corruption; compare Old High German gunt, pus.

The word barnacles, for eyeglasses, spectacles, is still general dialect use in parts of Scotland, and in many English places from the border south to East Anglia and Somerset. Sir Walter Scott in Nigel (1822) has this: “Buy a pair of David Ramsay’s barnacles, the King never reads Hebrew or Greek without them.” Long before Scott’s time, we find the word in Damon and Pitheas (1582): “These spectacles put on . . . They bee gay barnikles.” Dickens, in Pickwick (1837) has: “He’s heerd all about you from the sawbones in barnacles.”

Barnacles (always plural) is also an instrument applied to the nose of a savage bull, or of a restive horse while being shod. Captain Grose recorded the word in England’s North Country in 1790. In cant use, barnacles were the irons once put on felons in jails. Cotgrave’s early 17th-century French-English dictionary has, “Museliere, barnacle for an unruly horse’s nose.” Wyclif in his translantion of Proverbs xxvi (1388) has “Beting to an hors, and bernacle to an asse”. An older form was bernak. The Parvulorum Parvulorum Sive Clericorum, an Anglo-Latin lexicon of c. 1440, has “Bernak for horse, chamus”.

The word is from the Anglo French bernak. It is still in use in Cumberland and in Northamptonshire.