de la Beche, and "Hurrah! for Saint George " (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Tuesday, April 23, 2013, 16:20 (4234 days ago) @ slowhands

Welldone S for remembering St George's Day, something many seem to think is non p-c these days yet we happily and correctly celebrate St David & Patrick.. Especially on this warm Spring day, perfect for a "ramble" whether thro' the daffs of Dymock or on this website a la Fred. Interestingly with respect to this post and it's hints of France, Shakespeare's famous phrase immortalised in "Henry V" came from actual accounts of the battle of Agincourt and the cries of Henry and the English footsoldiers, "Hurrah! Hurrah!, Saint George and Merrie England”.
No doubt there were Foresters among the ranks of the now famous longbowmen, some firing arrows with points forged in the Forest. I'm happy to celebrate St George despite being a lifelong lover of the French country, people and way of life. We holiday there every year and have visited many historical sites from the Hundred Years War etc including Agincourt. This led to my son & now wife taking up target archery as a sport, they don't shoot traditional longbows altho' many others do and boy do they take some physical strength and unusual skills - unlike the "modern" bows which shoot low & flat straight into the target like a rifle, the longbows still shoot high trajectories up into the sky, so practising range-finding is key to hitting their targets.

Sadly despite these visits my French speaking is still only "O" level conversational standard, (altho I'm now "S" level at the backup arm-waving), so I've had to really think about the word "beche". Yes literally as a noun it translates to spade, yet like so many French words it has other meanings dependant on it's usage and also associated words in the phrase.
eg beches de la mer , or beche "of the sea", equates to seafood specifically sea cucumber from the Far East. However in fashion circles they say "tete-beche" which means "head to tail", with "tete" being head as you'll know, so ?.... and I though English could be an odd language !

Resorting to tinternet I even found a reference to a "beche" being a pneumatic forge hammer, pronounced "besh" so perhaps this is where our "bash" comes from - a great word for oldfashioned mechanical engineers like me, we're all "metal-bashers" at heart. Maybe the French army's arrow points were made by using a "beche", aka "de la beche"... ??. Which leads us to wonder if "beche" is a more generic word for a "tool" and not just spade and the family "de la Beche" were in fact metalworkers ??!!. However I think not as Pneumatic hammers and apparently the English word "bash" all have far more recent origins and this is too-lateral thinking.

I think in our case the name "de la Beche", which literally translates to "of the spade", is a reference to someone who is working the land for arable crops, akin to the seafood reference. Visitors to Normandy nowadays will see many green pastures with pampered thoroughbred race horses, I'm sure dating back to the Norman invaders and their advanced use of cavalry, plus fruit orchards much like those of Dymock and Herefordshire; no doubt centuries ago like us they also grew more arable crops than nowadays, Normandy's undulating land is not as ideally suited to the immense flat fields of modern farming.
This seems to be backedup by my schoolboy French which tells me Beauchamps literally translates to "beautiful"(fertile?) "fields", which certainly applies to the clayred fields of South Herefordshire. So I think that's the origins of this particular name, I suspect the supposedly correct pronounciation of Beecham is just a deliberate attempt to disguise it's French origins, understandably given England's long history of ongoing wars with France until relatively recent times.

That was an enjoyable ramble, time for tea methinks, the toast is Saint George !.

PS Fred, while on the subject of Beech, in case you're wondering longbows were made from especially grown yew trees, and the arrows from cedar.