spancel

[prettygoodword]

spancel (SPAN-suhl) - n., a rope hobble for a horse, cow, sheep, etc.; v., to hobble with a spancel.


That is, loosely tie two legs together, so the animal can walk a little i.e. hobble but not wander off. Taken around 1600 from Dutch or Low German spansel, from spannen, to bind/harness, originally spread and a cognate of span.

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

I first encountered that word—with a different and metaphorical but clearly derivative meaning—in The Once and Future King, and the context has irreparably tainted it for me.

[prettygoodword]

I admit I'm curious ...

[full_metal_ox]

This was a magical tool used by Morgause in her seduction of Arthur (warning for coercive love magic, magical use of human remains, and cruelty to animals):

The Queen opened the coffer in the darkness and stood near the moonlit patch from the window, holding a strip of something in her hands. It was like a tape.

The strip was a less cruel piece of magic than the black cat (1) had been, but more gruesome. It was called the Spancel—after the rope with which domestic animals were hobbled—and there were several of them in the secret coffers of the Old Ones. They were a piseog (2) rather than a great magic. Morgause had got it from the body of a soldier which had been brought home by her husband, for burial in the Out Isles.

It was a tape of human skin, cut from the silhouette of the dead man. That is to say, the cut had been begun at the right shoulder, and the knife—going carefully in a double slit so as to make a tape—had gone down the outside of the right arm, round the outer edge of each finger as if along the seams of a glove, and up on the inside of the arm to the arm-pit. Then it had gone down the side of the body, down the leg and up it to the crutch, and so on until it had completed the circuit of the corpse's outline, at the shoulder from which it had started. It made a long ribbon.

The way to use a Spancel was this. You had to find the man you loved while he was asleep. Then you had to throw it over his head without waking him, and tie it in a bow. If he woke while you were doing this, he would be dead within the year. If he did not wake until the operation was over, he would be bound to fall in love with you.

(1) She’s introduced boiling a black cat to death as a component in an invisibility spell, chiefly as a pretext for contemplating herself in the mirror; being a magical dilettante (the serious witch in the family was Morgan), she grows bored with the procedure halfway through and dumps the cat soup out the window. Oh, well.

(2) Possible future Word of the Day!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/6kc9y3/irish_superstitionspiseogspisóca/

https://archive.li/MRvJx (Note that this article misuses the term “voodoo” to denote cursing via poppet or other material proxy.)

[prettygoodword]

:adds piseog to the queue: