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not worth dwelling upon, but they are all old English words, 
each with its own history, and each worth stopping with for a 
short time. 
Field is of course the largest of all. It is a genuine old Saxon 
word, found in all the northern nations of Europe in the different 
forms of field, feld, veld, velt, etc. It is generally joined with 
some word showing the size or shape, as ten-acre field, six acre 
field, long field, broad field, (corrupted as a place-name to Brad- 
field), 3-cornered field, ete. 
Meadow, or Mead, is another very old English word. It occurs 
in several of our oldest authors, and in the different vocabularies it 
is alwaysgiven as the translation of pratum, and in them we also find 
mention of the meadow-sweet or meadow-wort, which I have no 
doubt is the same plant which we now call by that name.* 
And the English meadow was exactly the Latin pratum, culti- 
vated ground for grass only, and not brought under the plough 
and so always green, (Cicero speaks of pratorum herbescens viri- 
ditas).+ And this was certainly the English meadow, which in 
its A. S. derivation is the mowed ground. The meadow was 
always a pasture of large extent ( “ wide-skirted meads” is 
Shakespeare’s description), yielding a quantity of rich but not 
very superior grass. In our part of the country the meadows are 
all lowland pastures, and hay dealers draw a wide distinction 
between upland and meadow hay. 
Close is also an old English word, though it is derived directly 
from the Latin Clausura, or locus inclusus. It probably almost 
always meant a place enclosed with walls (the Promptorium has 
“ cloos or yerde, clausura,” and yerde is the yard or garden), and so 
* Hoc pratum, a meadowe. Nominale, 15th Cent. 
Regina prate, an® medesewte. 
Melissa, an°® medeswote. 
Melissa, an°®® medeworte. Latin and English, voc., xv. Cent. 
+ De senectute. 
