Will this be on the test?
Dear Word Detective: I recently read “A Plague of Poison” by Maureen Ash. It’s a Templar Knight mystery set in medieval England. In it she has characters walk across the “bail,” which must be some open area in a castle or village, since that’s the only thing that makes sense to me. But none of the definitions of “bail” that I’ve been able to find confirm that. Can you shed some light? I assume it has something to to with “bailiff” and “bailiwick.” — Larry Throgmorton.
Your assumption is certainly plausible. One kind of “bail” is definitely related to “bail” and “bailiwick.” But the “bail” you’re asking about may not be related to that “bail.” Whoa. Just typing that gave me a headache.
Let’s begin with the most common sense of “bail” in use today, that meaning “money or other security given for the release of a prisoner awaiting trial” or the bond posted for such release (“Wanda sold her Beemer so Lyle could make bail”). This “bail” comes from the Old French verb “baillier,” meaning “take charge, control,” which came in turn from the Latin “bajulare,” which meant “to bear a burden” or “control,” and came from “bajulus,” meaning “porter.”
Although we use “bailiff” today to mean simply a court officer, the job used to be quite a bit more powerful. The “bailiff” in 13th century England was the Sheriff’s assistant, bearing law enforcement responsibility for a large district. Thus the “bail” in “bailiff” refers not to “bail money,” but back to the “take charge” sense of that Old French “baillier.” The district or area over which a given bailiff had control was his “bailiwick,” the “wick” coming from the Old English “wic,” meaning “town or village.” (That “wick,” and its relative “wich,” are still common in place names such as Warwick and Greenwich.) The modern figurative use of “bailiwick” to mean “area of expertise or experience” (“I’ll let you change that flat tire, Tom, since car repair is your bailiwick”) arose in the mid-19th century.
“Bail” in the sense you encountered in that mystery carries the general sense of “line of fortification.” Medieval castles were often surrounded by several rings of fortified walls, known as “bails,” with courtyards between them. Eventually “bail” was also used to mean the courtyards themselves, so the characters in that novel were, as you surmised, strolling across a courtyard. This kind of “bail” may be related to the “control” meaning of that same Old French “baillier” (in the specific sense of “confine”), but it may be a completely separate word from the “bail” which gave us “bailiff,” etc.
By now you’re probably also wondering about “bail” in the sense of “remove water from a boat.” That is definitely a completely separate kind of “bail,” in this case derived from the Latin “bacula,” meaning “bucket.” The verb phrase “bail out” (and the noun “bailout”), whether referring to jumping from an airplane or rescuing a foundering enterprise, comes from this “bail.”
