Lost Word Of The Day (81)

‘Tis the season of coughs and sneezes and other dread diseases. Whilst inoculation can (perhaps) ward off the worst that viruses can throw at us, in times gone by the elderly and infirm were particularly concerned about contracting a churchyarder or a graveyarder, a contraction of a churchyard cough, so named because the persistent and awful cough was likely to lead to the sufferer’s death.

A description of the cough first appeared in print in Motteux’s 1696 translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel; “both my gentleman had…a churchyard cough in the lungs, a catarrh in the throat”. Steel in The Funeral five years later observed, “I always said by his Church-yard-cough, you’d Bury him”.

The Chester Chronicle of May 9, 1800 reported the epitaph on a victim’s grave who had had a good innings before she succumbed. “To the memory of Kate Jones” it ran “a wealthy spinster, ag’d four-score, who’d many achs…knelling her friends to the grave with a churchyard cough. Long hung she on Death’s nose, till one March morn, there came a cold north east and blew her off”. Epitaphs aren’t what they used to be.

There are printed references to the persistent hacking cough in the records until just before the First World War.

I shall be on my guard for a graveyarder this winter.