`The inferior sort o' people, ye'll observe, are kent by sorts o' bye-names, some o' them, as Glaiket Christie, and the Dewke's Gibbie', wrote Scott in Guy Mannering in 1815. I am pleased to inform you that a bye- name is still used in parts of County Down for a nickname, or a name other than the one registered at Baptism or marriage. The late Tomas de Bhalraithe once told me of being asked by the courts to help solve a problem which had arisen over claims to land in West Cork.
Everybody seemed to be Greenes and Whites in the place concerned, and yet the land was registered in the 19th century to nobody but O'Sullivans. The explanation was that to distinguish between the two local O'Sullivans clans , O Suilleabhain Glas and O Suilleabhain Ban, the former were known only by their bye-name Glas, which the National Schools translated as Greene, and the latter by the bye-name Ban, turned White by schoolmasters, and afterwards by solicitors.
At any rate, Helen Blake from Bangor asked if the word bye- name, or by-name, is found in Ulster only. I certainly heard the word often in south Leinster; and the English Dialect Dictionary tells me that it is common in the north of England and in Cornwall. It is old. Holland's Plutarch's Morals (1603) has: `He got himself a by-name, and everie man called him Epaminindas.'
Rab Burns wrote of `the knife that nicket Abel's craig' in Captain Grose's Perigrinations. A century later Stevenson has `A rope to your craig and gibbet to clatter your bones on', in Catriona. Ann McFadden of Artane, by way of Donegal, won't be surprised to her that craig, meaning neck or throat, was imported to the north from Scotland. The Scots had some interesting compounds not found in Ulster, as far as I know: craig-bane, the collar-bone; craig-cloth, a tie, cravat; craig-o'mutton, the lean part of a neck of mutton, also called scrag. Craig is old. Dunbar has it in Flyting (1505): `Thy lang lean craig. Thy pure pynnit thrott.' It's from the Middle Dutch craegh, the neck.
John Fitzgerald wrote from Kilkenny asking about his father's gaffel of hay-an armful. From Irish gabhail, verbal noun of gabh, catch, take hold of, my correspondent supposes. I don't think so. This interesting word's origin is more likely the Norman French gavelle (Modern French javelle), a swathe, a loose sheaf. The dialects of England have it as gavel, a bundle.