SCUTCH: 
169 
time of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, to discover the meaning 
and derivation of our Cheshire word “ scutch,” and then it will 
require tracing through several dialectal changes before we 
reach the exact form which we are accustomed to use. In the 
Anglo-Saxon language the word cwic meant alive and also lively. 
We have retained the word in our modern English language, 
quite unaltered in sound ; but we now spell it quick, probably the 
better to represent the old pronunciation. Formerly quick simply 
meant alive or living, as it did in the Anglo-Saxon time ; indeed, 
that sense of the word is not quite obsolete, although we do not 
often make use of it, but more frequently attach to it its other 
meaning, lively, which implies a certain amount of motion. But 
in the Book of Common Prayer we still make use of, and under- 
stand the expression, “ the quick and the dead.” So, hawthorn 
plants are, in many dialects, called “ quicks,” because they are 
alive, and a hawthorn hedge is called a “quickset hedge,” be- 
cause it is set with quick or living plants in contradistinction to 
a dead hedge, made of thorn branches stuck into the ground, of 
palings, or of posts and rails. But, generally speaking, we 
attach the meaning lively, with implied motion, to the word 
quick. Thus, if a person moves about, or does anything in a 
brisk manner, we say he is quick ; and in the Cheshire dialect 
we speak of a drain having a “ quick fall,” really meaning that 
the water can flow along the drain in a lively manner because 
the drain has plenty of fall. 
So much for the general meaning of the word quick, whether 
in Anglo-Saxon or in English. The Anglo-Saxons applied the 
adjective cwic to several plants in which they recognised any 
extraordinary vitality. Thus cwic-heam was their name for the 
aspen tree, because its leaves, being perpetually in motion, gave 
it the appearance of being alive. In later days the names quick- 
beam and quicken have been transferred to another tree in 
which the leaves are not tremulous, namely, to the mountain 
ash, for a reason which I shall have to mention later. In the 
same way the Anglo-Saxons having noticed that the roots of a 
certain grass, which we know by the botanical name of Triticum 
repens, and in Cheshire “scutch,” possessed an amazing amount 
of vitality ; that these roots crept along underground till they 
filled up the land, almost to the exclusion of every other grass ; 
that, work how they would, it seemed almost impossible to kill 
it, for if ever so small a piece were left in the ground, that piece 
would grow and spread, in short, that the plant seemed to be 
vitality itself in a tangible form ; they gave to this plant, par 
excellence, the name cwice. Accordingly this grass is still called 
quick or quicks in many parts of the north of England, in Norfolk, 
Suffolk, and Yorkshire. Hudson, in the Flora Anglica, speaks 
of it as quick grass, which is probably a name he had heard 
somewhere, though he does not say where. 
The Anglo-Saxons often formed the plural of substantives by 
adding the letter n or en to the singular word. Cheshire men 
