The OED also contains an entry for the delightfully morbid “murder of crows” (“morther of crowys,” circa 1475), which was purportedly inspired by the propensity of crows to feast on the dead, particularly on battlefields. But, sadly, there is ample evidence that collective phrases like this were merely fanciful inventions concocted for medieval glossaries like The Book of Saint Albans from 1486 and revived, centuries later, by James Lipton in his An Exaltation of Larks from 1968. Logophiles may, of course, exercise poetic license in continuing to indulge in such treats as “a skulk of thieves,”
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