bailiff
BAY-liff
noun
An officer of a court
Only a quick one this week, as the outside world has been encroaching on my time with the dictionary.
Last week I caught up with a friend who, without giving you all the tawdry details, is in dispute with another party about something involving a moderate sum of money. Before long the subject of bailiffs came up and I thought it would make an interesting entry for Word of the Week, breaking up a long run of Latin or Greek words that we’ve had for the past few weeks.
Alas, I was wrong. Bailiff comes ultimately from Latin, via French. The Latin word ‘baiulus’ means ‘porter’ or ‘steward’. The word ‘bail’ (a sum of money you pay to secure the release of a prisoner in exchange for a promise that they will appear in court) shares the same root.
Bailiffs have always been associated with courts and the law since as far back as the Norman Conquest, when the word began to replace the Anglo-Saxon word ‘reeve’ (those familiar with The Canterbury Tales will remember The Reeve’s Tale). In the absence of anything approaching a modern police force or probation service, bailiffs would be those who carried out the orders of the court, and the area of their jurisdiction was known as their ‘bailiwick’, a word which survives to this day (‘wic’ being an Anglo-Saxon word for ‘village’ which survives in some place names like Norwich [‘North Village’]).
Bailiff’s responsibilities included things like issuing summonses or bringing people to the court for their trial. Historical courts were not purely concerned with legal matters and had several administrative responsibilities too, similar to a local council today, so a bailiff’s responsibilities would have also included collection of rent of debts, for which they remain well known today.
Old Bailey?