Medieval Mumbles ~ “Hastou owt herd þe geste”

Devoted readers of any genre will understand when I write about taking shelter in a story, or mention the family of characters and authors who make their home in my head. But would even the most dedicated of readers understand if I stated that the best of gestes is to be found in geste?

Last week, I wrote about the “Fole’s Feste.” The quote that introduced that phrase included this fascinating word–‘gest(e)’. Fascinating–at least to me–because this one noun has four distinct meanings, none of which carry over directly into modern English equivalent terms.

The Middle English Dictionary provides the following information about ‘gest(e).”

1. (a)A poem or song about heroic deeds, a chivalric romance; (b) a poem or song of any kind; (c) a prose chronicle or history, a prose romance or tale.
2. A race, family, kindred . . .
3. (a) stopping or resting place, lodgings, hostel; (b) food, refreshment; (c) fig. the resting place of a hawk; (d) fig. the seat of the soul.
4. (a) An invited guest, a guest at a meal, banquet etc.; unboden gest, an uninvited guest; (b) a stranger or traveler entertained in one’s home; one entertained by a monastery or the like; goddes gest . . .

Of these four definitions, modern day ‘guest’ bears the closest resemblance to ‘gest’ visually. However, phonetically, the ‘g’ in modern ‘guest’ is what is termed a ‘hard g’ while the initial letter of Middle English ‘gest(e)’ is termed a ‘soft g’. And in the middle ages it was the sound of words, not the spelling of words, that mattered.

All four of these varied definitions apply to a word with a single pronunciation. Albeit that pronunciation might vary from dialect to dialect, but within dialects that word would be the same for all four meanings. As distinct as these meanings are–poem, family, resting place, stranger–some connotations exist within all of them. Those connotations being, entertainment, and shelter or ‘resting place.’

Whether it be the welcome of a stranger into the home [shelter] of a close knit group such as a family or the poems and stories told around the fireside in that home and shared between stranger and residents alike, all apply to ‘gest(e)’.

In my view the loss of this word that crosses meanings between story, home, and folk leaves Modern English in a sad state. For we have no readily available phrase to help us link story, person, and shelter. Leave a comment, please, and share how you might use ‘gest(e)’ if we were to restore it to Modern English.