Shrill nightingales? "shill", "shrill", and "sh'ill" in the dialect poems of William Barnes

Abstract

William Barnes’s dialect poems provide ample evidence (unnoticed by lexicographers) of the survival in Dorset in the nineteenth century of the complete range of medieval senses of the words shill and shrill, both positive and negative. The senses for the adjective fall into four groups (with corresponding senses for the adverb): (a) ‘clear, audible’; (b) ‘loud, resonant’; (c) ‘melodious, sweet-sounding, pleasing to the ear’; (d) ‘high-pitched, piercing, sharp’. None of these senses can be restricted to one particular spelling, and it is impossible to know whether Barnes and his publishers regarded shill and shrill as separate, unrelated words or as different forms of the same word. The survival of the complete range of senses in this one area in the south-west of England offers, nevertheless, a remarkable testimony to the resilience of the language outside the mainstream, and should prompt further enquiry as to whether any of the earlier senses that are obsolete in present-day standard English may have survived in other regions also.