![]() ![]() The reference here is to the English Pale of Calais:Īnd Sir Iohn Radcliff, Leoten aunt, warnet and charget al þe cuntre þat was of þe Englisshe pale, shuld come and bring a thaire goodes, and breke doun theire houses and so, many of hem did, and of hem stale away, some into Picardy and some into Flandres.īut it wasn’t long before pale came to represent a figurative boundary. Use of pale to refer to such a territory dates to c.1453 when it appears in a version of the prose Brut, a chronicle of English history that mixed legend and fact. And there was the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia where Jews were allowed to live (1791–1917). There was the English Pale in Ireland, the region around Dublin controlled by the English from the twelfth until the sixteenth centuries, when the rest of Ireland was conquered by the English. There was the English Pale of Calais, the area of coastal France around that city that was controlled by the English from 1347–1558. This sense of the word can be applied generally, but it has often been deployed in three specific senses. (For days shall come to you, and your enemies will surround you with a pale, and they shall besiege you on all sides.)īy the middle of the next century, pale had developed a figurative meaning of a region or territory, one actually or figuratively enclosed by a fence or boundary. We see this sense in the same biblical translation, only this time in Luke 19:43 and the manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 359:īut daies schulen come in thee, and thin enemyes schulen enuyroun thee with a pale, and thei shulen go streyt on alle sydis. The Vulgate reads figens palum.īut in English, pale could also mean a fence made of pales. Other manuscripts of this translation have picching a pole. (Who peers through its windows and listens at its gates, who camps near its house and fastens a pale to the walls, he shall set his tent nearby, angels shall bring good things to it forever.) He shal ordeyne his litle hous at the hondis of it goodis, bi aungelis during. Who byholdeth bi the wyndowes of it, and in the ȝatis of it is herende who restith biside the hous of it, and in the walles of it pitcheth a pale. From the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian 959: It appears in a Wycliffite Bible from before 1382 in a translation of Ecclesiasticus 14.24–25 from the Latin Vulgate. But the word really gains traction in English in the fourteenth century after the influence of Anglo-Norman has made itself felt. The word makes a single appearance in the Old English Corpus in a c.1000 glossary by Ælfric of Eyesham which glosses the Latin palus with the Old English pal. The English word pole is also from the Latin palus but has had a different semantic development over the centuries. The Anglo-Norman is, of course, ultimately from the Latin. The word is borrowed from both the Latin palus and the Anglo-Norman pal, both meaning stake. The literal meaning of pale in the phrase is a stake, a sharpened piece of wood that is driven into the ground to form part of a barrier or fence. The phrase is well understood, but many, if not most, do not recognize what a pale is in this context. Something that is beyond the pale is inappropriate or outside the bounds of what is considered to be acceptable.
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