Note 64 — Of the London Chimney-Sweepers. (continued 4)

Of the derivation of the word Sewer there have been many conjectures, but no approximation to the truth. One of the earliest instances I have met with of any detailed mention of sewers, is in an address delivered by a “Coroner,” whose name does not appear, to “a jury of sewers.” This address was delivered somewhere between the years 1660 and 1670. The coroner having first spoken of the importance of “Navigation and Drayning” (draining), then came to the question of sewers.

“Sewars,” he said, “are to be accounted your grand Issuers of Water, from whence I conceive they carry their name (Sewars quasi Issuers). I shall take his opinion who delivers them to be Currents of Water, kept in on both sides with banks, and, in some sense, they may be called a certain kind of a little or small river. But as for the derivation of the word Sewar, from two of our English words, Sea and Were, or, as others will have it, Sea and Ward, give me leave, now I have mentioned it, to—leave it to your judgments.

“However, this word Sewar is very famous amongst us, both for giving the title of the Commission of Sewars itself, and for being the ordinary name of most of your common water-courses, for Drayning, and therefore, I presume, there are none of you of these juries but both know—

“1. What Sewars signify, and also, in particular,

“2. What they are; and of a thing so generally known, and of such general use.”

The Rev. Dr. Lemon, who gave the world a work on “English Etymology,” from the Greek and Latin, and from the Saxon and Norman, was regarded as a high authority during the latter part of the last century, when his quarto first appeared. The following is his account, under the head “Sewers”—

“Skinn. rejects Minsh’s. deriv. of ‘olim scriptum fuisse seward à sea-ward, quod versus mare factæ sunt: longè verisimilius à Fr. Gall. eauier; sentina; incile, supple. aquarum:’—then why did not the Dr. trace this Fr. Gall. eauier? if he had, he would have found it distorted ab Ὑδωρ, aqua; sewers being a species of aqueduct:—Lye, in his Add., gives another deriv., viz. ‘ab Iceland. sua, colare; ut existimo; ad quod referre vellem sewer; cloaca; per sordes urbis ejiciuntur:’—the very word sordes gives me a hint that sewer may be derived à ‘Σαιρω, vel Σαροω, verro: nempe quia sordes, quæ everruntur è domo, in unum locum accumulantur; R. Σωρος, cumulus: Voss.’—a collection of sweepings, slop, dirt, &c.”

But these are the follies of learning. Had our lexicographers known that the vulgar were, as Dr. Latham says, “the conservators of the Saxon language” with us, they would have sought information from the word “shore,” which the uneducated, and, consequently, unperverted, invariably use in the place of the more polite “sewer”—the common sewer is always termed by them “the common shore.” Now the word shore, in Saxon, is written score and scor (for c = h), and means not only a bank, the land immediately next to the sea, but a score, a tally—for they are both substantives, made from the verb sceran (p. scear, scær, pp. scoren, gescoren), to shear, cut off, share, divide; and hence they meant, in the one case, the division of the land from the sea; and in the other, a division cut in a piece of wood, with a view to counting. The substantive scar has the same origin; as well as the verb to score, to cut, to gash. The Scandinavian cognates for the Saxon scor may be cited as proofs of what is here asserted. They are, Icel., skor, a notch; Swed., skâra, a notch; and Dan., skaar and skure, a notch, an incision. It would seem, therefore, that the word shore, in the sense of sewer (Dan., skure; Anglice, shure, for k = h), originally meant merely a score or incision made in the ground, a ditch sunk with the view of carrying off the refuse-water, a watercourse, and consequently a drain. A sewer is now a covered ditch, or channel for refuse water.