Scots word of the week

BONDAGER

AS tomorrow is International Women’s Day I thought I would take a look at a role that was filled mainly, but not always, by women. The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) defines the term thus: “One who performs bondage service, but latterly applied only to the female field-worker that each cottar or farmtenant is bound, by the conditions of his tenancy, to supply to do regular field-work on the farm”.

This method of employment existed until the early 20th century. Our earliest example comes from Haddington in the Statistical

Account of 1845: “The farm servants are generally bound to keep bondagers…that is, persons to work in the barn or fields when required”. They seem to also have been women of lowly station as illustrated in this sniffy Fife example of 1895 from Sarah Tyler’s Kincaid’s Widow: “It might be a suitable plan for hinds [a farm-servant, a ploughman] or bondagers but not for people of our degree”.

In 1991 Sue Glover wrote her play The Bondagers and the following is a review of a performance in the Royal Lyceum from the Edinburgh Evening News of October 2014: “As history, the story behind The Bondagers is fascinating and was probably little known prior to the arrival of Sue Glover’s hit play”. Our research however shows that the concept is still within the living memory of some folk as recalled by Alistair Moffat, former director of Edinburgh Festival’s Fringe, in an interview in The Herald of September 2015: “My grannie was a bondager and worked on singling [thinning out seedlings] and weeding in the fields. ”

By Pauline Cairns Speitel, of Scottish Language Dictionaries, https://dsl.ac.uk