Sus l’histouaithe du mot ‘vrai’
Written by Ethyn Maki. On 24 November 2024 Ethyn gave a talk to the Vraiqu’sie Artist research group on his research.
For the past two years, I have studied Jèrriais names for seaweed and aquatic plants. During this time, I was often confronted with the ambiguity and difficulty of engaging with cultural meanings from an outsider's perspective, a challenge only compounded considering that the primary sources for Jèrriais and related Norman names are limited to historical dictionaries and other textual collections. However, in my work as an ethnobotanist, I have found that such resources are generally overlooked repositories of information on the relationships we form with the natural world, both past and present. I am particularly fascinated by the development and use of plant names, which offer profound insights into the symbolic and cultural associations we form with the botanical life surrounding us.
Seaweed has long been a cultural cornerstone of life in the Channel Islands. With a rich history and practical importance, it’s no surprise that Jèrriais has over 50 names for seaweed and aquatic plants. Such diversity speaks to the agricultural and economic value of seaweed to islanders as well as its longstanding historical significance in the collective consciousness of Jèrriais and Norman speakers (dating back at least almost a millennium). These names reflect not just the islanders’ reliance on seaweed but also their deep-rooted connection to the surrounding marine world.
Most Jèrriais seaweed names are comparative, functioning as visual and linguistic metaphors between marine algae and various facets of terrestrial life, drawing on historical legal traditions (e.g. l’s estrandes ‘the legal right to gather seaweed from the foreshore’), habitats (e.g. du vrai d’vivyi ‘fish pond seaweed, freshwater seaweed’), terrestrial plant names (e.g. d’la chérise dé mé ‘cherry of the sea’), familiar objects (e.g. lé collet ‘collar-like seaweed’), anatomy (e.g. d’la bédaine ‘paunchy seaweed’), and sensory experiences (e.g. d’la cliaque ‘the sound of wet seaweed thrown on the ground’). Understanding these names can provide a glimpse into how historical Jèrriais speakers perceived the natural resources surrounding their waters and shores. The stories behind them are not merely about marine botany or linguistics; they encapsulate a local way of categorising and thinking about the natural environment.
The ellipsoid-shaped air bladders of species like Fucus vesiculosus allow the algae to remain upright when submerged by the tide. These features and the sensory qualities associated with them have served as the inspiration for several Jèrriais seaweed names.
Photograph from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.
Seaweed is commonly known as vrai or vré in Jersey, and these names were later adopted into English and standardised as vraic, based on their Dgèrnésiais and Auregnais spellings. To better understand why vraic holds such importance, we can trace the history of its name. These general names for seaweed emerged from an ancient legal custom known by several terms, including the Droit de Varech, Droit de Wreccum, Droit de Bris, Jus Naufragii, etc. This custom refers to the right to gather and claim goods that land ashore within the boundaries of a fief or territory, ranging from beached whales, goods like casks of wine, and, more importantly, the valuable seaweed that grows in the intertidal zone. The exact application of this tradition varied by locale and time. Norman customary law, the Ancienne Coutume de Normandie, prescribed: ‘Sous ce nom de varech sont comprises toutes choses que l’eau jette à terre par tourmente et fortune de mer, ou qui arrivent si près de terre qu’un homme à cheval puisse y toucher avec sa lance’ [Under this name varech are included all things that the water throws ashore by storm and damaging events occurring at sea, or which arrive so close to land that a man on horseback can touch it with his spear] (Dictionnaire du patois Normand en usage dans le departement de l'Eure, p. 410).
‘Les pilleurs de mer’, an engraving by Jules Noël, from the 1877 Les naufrages célèbres, p. 283, depicting coastal inhabitants waiting along the shore to seize the goods that land ashore from a shipwreck, exercising their Droit de Varech. Just as the contents of wrecked vessels that washed ashore held great value, so too did the seaweed that was also inevitably carried ashore alongside it, from whence the term vraic emerged.
The Jèrriais seaweed names vrai and vré, along with their counterparts, French varech and English wreck, are cognates, or sets of words related to one another that descend from the same source. The origin of these terms is in Anglo-Norman wrec ‘shipwreck or wrecked goods washed ashore’, which itself emerged from a Germanic source, most likely Old Norse vágrek or *vrek ‘flotsam, wreckage’. As Old Norse *vrek developed into Anglo-Norman wrec and eventually into Jèrriais vrai, it underwent semantic drift, or shift in meaning, from referring simply to wreckage to eventually also encompassing seaweed, a logical and observational transition for a marine-based culture as both are regularly cast ashore by the tides.
Dating this shift in meaning is difficult due to a lack of surviving materials. It can be confidently said, however, that this algal sense had already emerged by the beginning of the 12th century based on surviving written sources. The earliest attestation of Anglo-Norman wrec referring specifically to algae is in the Voyage of Saint Brendan, penned by Benedeit. The text provides a rather charming reference to the ‘marin werec’, glossed in Medieval Latin translations as alga ‘seaweed’, draped around the neck of an otter that would regularly bring fish and firewood a reclusive, island-bound hermit encountered by the saint on his journey. An algal sense in Anglo-Norman wrec likely emerged much earlier than this tale. However, as seaweed was primarily the domain of illiterate farmers and agriculturalists, any earlier references were likely not recorded or have not survived.
We see references to vraic being exchanged as an agricultural commodity as early as the late 13th century, like in the 1294 Comptes du Gardien Henry de Cobham, which records a payment of ‘I. qr. de wereix et I cabotel. … et rem. in granario…’ [1 quarter of vraic and 1 cabot…remains in the granary…]
Image courtesy of the Société Jersiaise archives.
Vraic and its related terms share a long and fabled history in Norman and English legal tradition. The same cannot be said for the many other Jèrriais seaweed names, which only began to emerge in written sources beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily in dictionaries and collections of ‘dialectal’ terms, coinciding with the development of the fields of natural and social sciences. These other names, primarily morphological and onomatopoeic, are mostly encountered only in Jersey and the other Channel Islands and represent more localised, popular conceptions of seaweed and the marine domain.
The etymology and meaning of the above names, along with the several dozen other extant Jèrriais seaweed names, will be explored in my upcoming paper, Eune bouonne mathée d’mots: les noms d’vrai, which is to be published in next year.