Beware the Lides of March
March is the month which proverbially ‘comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb’. That proverb, which dates back to the 17th century, is just one of many traditional sayings about the tempestuous nature of this month’s weather. This stormy month, part winter and part spring, has been called ‘March many-weathers’ – and, just as it contains many weathers, it has also had a surprising multiplicity of names in English.
In linguistic terms, March has an interesting and unusual history. It is the only month in the calendar to have had an alternative name in different dialects of English until relatively modern times. It owes its most well-known name to the Roman god Mars, because festivals in his honour used to be celebrated during the month. Like the other month-names now standard in British English, this name was established in England during the Anglo-Saxon period, as part of the adoption of the Julian calendar.
In the Middle Ages and for some time afterwards, though, March had another name in some regions of England: Lide. Significantly, this name is recorded almost exclusively in sources from the southwest of England. In the late 13th century it crops up in the South English Legendary, a very popular collection of saints’ lives produced in that part of the country. It is used too by the chronicler Robert of Gloucester, whose name gives away his regional origins.
The name also seems to have featured in proverbs about the weather of March. One 14th-century poet, lamenting the evil times he felt had befallen England under the rule of Edward II, comments on the recent suppression of the Knights Templar by saying they are an example of how wealth ‘cometh and goeth as weathers do in Lide’. By this he meant that earthly prosperity is as changeable, as unpredictable, as the storms of March.
‘Lide’ still appears to have been in common use in that particular region of England in the 17th century. The antiquarian John Aubrey, a Wiltshire man by birth, observed that: ‘The vulgar in the West of England do call the month of March, Lide.’ He also recorded a proverb about how to ward off illness through diet: ‘Eat leeks in Lide, and ramsins [wild garlic] in May, and all the year after physicians may play.’ Other 17th-century sources record the name ‘Lide-lily’ for the daffodil, appropriate for this flower of early spring.
By the 17th century ‘Lide’ was still in use, but now in a more restricted part of southwest England – apparently, only in Cornwall. There, the first Friday in March was known as ‘Friday in Lide’ and was a holiday for tin-miners (perhaps because it falls near the feast of St Piran, patron saint of miners, on 5 March). There was a 19th-century Cornish proverb which observed that ‘Ducks won’t lay till they’ve drunk Lide water’. A region with its own distinctive linguistic and cultural history, Cornwall seems to have preserved this unlikely legacy from medieval English long after it had died out elsewhere.
The etymology of ‘Lide’ goes back to the Old English name Hlyda, and by the late Middle Ages it was the only survivor of what had once been a variety of vernacular names for the months in the different dialects of Anglo-Saxon England. Hlyda seems to be connected to the Old English word hlud, ‘loud, noisy’, so it might well be a reference to the blustery winds of March. One Old English poem refers to March as ‘hlyda healic’, ‘loud-voiced Lide’, and says that this month journeys through the world accompanied by frost and hail-showers. In Anglo-Saxon sources, too, instances of the name Hlyda are concentrated in the southwest, within what was then Wessex; elsewhere in the country the month seems to have been called Hreðmonað (perhaps named after a goddess
called Hreða).
There is no obvious reason why Lide, Hlyda, should have survived long after the other Old English month-names had been forgotten. But it is not surprising that the name did not outlast the 19th century: since that time, dialect variation between different regions of Britain has been disappearing very swiftly. It is (sadly) impossible now to imagine any region maintaining its own independent name for one month of the year; it would certainly present some interesting administrative problems when communicating with the rest of the country. The history of this little word is a reminder of the kind of rich dialect diversity which used to be common in Britain, but is becoming increasingly rare.
Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).
