Anglo-Norman Beiter in the Medieval Nautical Vocabulary

In nautical terms, tacking is a zig-zag, indirect means of advance when faced with a head wind. Medieval Scandinavian ships could sail much closer to the wind than other European craft, within 60 degrees it is judged, and thus developed the tacking operation long before it was practiced in other parts of Europe. This sea-faring capability was carried by the Northmen to the future Normandy.

In the Anglo-Norman poem Le Voyage de saint Brendan by Benedeit, Brendan and his monks are in a quandary when the favorable east wind drops off and they have not yet learned to put their faith entirely in God the Navigator.

As aviruns dunc se metent. La grace Deu mult regrettent, Quer ne sevent quel part aler, Ne quels cordes deient aler, Quel part beitrer, quel part tendre, Ne u devrunt lur curs prendre. Un meis sanz vent nagerent tut plein.¹

The perhaps grumpy monks set to their oars, judging themselves bereft of God’s grace. They do not know in which direction to row nor which lines to haul. The second aler is the verb haler and is derived from Old Norse. Although hala is only sparsely attested in the Norse written record, it could well have been a preferred term in the Old Danish carried to the future Normandy.² Elsewhere in the poem the author at times seems to forget the Irish ship of his Latin source, with its hide-covered wooden hull-frame, and instead provides details relevant to the Norse-inspired ships of Normandy and Britain, as illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. We seem called on to envisage a ship with a clinker-built hull of overlapping planks, a single square sail, and a complex of standing and running rigging (cordes). The sequences of changes rung on the phrase ‘ne savent’ (‘they do not know’) continues through the next couplet: ‘[ne sevent] Quel part beitrer, quel part tendre Ni u devrunt lur curs prendre’.

Ian Short and Brian Merrilees have refined their appreciation of Le Voyage de saint Brendan since their original edition of 1977. After a modern French translation in 1984, they published a bilingual edition in 2006 that may be thought to reflect their best understanding of key passages and words. The above couplet they render somewhat tautologically as follows: ‘[ils ne savent] ni dans quel direction gouverner, ni comment se guider, ni sur quel point mettre le cap’.³ The deixis is complicated here and it will be seen that there are two or more orders of magnitude.

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary has an entry for beitrer, where it is explained as ‘to steer’ and the variant forms beiter, beitier are also listed.⁴ The dictionary offers no etymologies in its entries and the Voyage offers the single attestation of the simple verb. What seems a figurative use is found in the phrase estreit beitrer, which the AND glosses as ‘to act carefully’. Two passages from the Proverbs of Sanson de Nanteuil, written in Britain, purportedly illustrate this use (see further below).⁵ Although the AND headword is beitrer, the forms beiter and beitier will be seen as more faithful to the etymology, even though this leaves us with a doublet or homonym, since beiter is also found in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary with the meanings ‘to survey, look over; keep watch’.

Beiter is to be derived from Old Norse beíta, one of the figurative meanings of which was to ‘cause to bite (into the wind)’, that is, to tack or luff in sailing (reflected in later English ‘to beat to windward’).⁶ In order to tack or effect a zig-zag advance into the wind, the sail might be lowered or reefed, the braces trimmed to set the sail at an angle to the axis of the hull, the windward corner of the sail (the tack) boomed out, the sheets at the bottom corners of the sail correspondingly tightened, perhaps even a bowline run forward to the stem to belly out the sail. We see this sail-trimming principle made concrete in Wace’s...