Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A historical subdivision of some northern counties in England, corresponding roughly to the hundred in other shires.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Formerly, in certain counties of northern, eastern, and midland England, a division or subdivision of a shire, generally corresponding to a hundred in other counties.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun In some northern counties of England, a division, or district, answering to the
hundred in other counties. Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire are divided into wapentakes, instead of hundreds.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An
administrative subdivision innorthern English counties , developed underNorse influence, and corresponding tohundreds in the rest of England.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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As you seem to have intuited from your own research on your site, the exact meaning of wapentake is a little obscure.
Defending the Tolkien Snobs Richard Nokes 2005
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I remember seeing Tolkien use it in a military context, leading me to say, "Oh! He assumes wapentake is a kind of war counsel."
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
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I remember seeing Tolkien use it in a military context, leading me to say, "Oh! He assumes wapentake is a kind of war counsel."
Defending the Tolkien Snobs Richard Nokes 2005
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As you seem to have intuited from your own research on your site, the exact meaning of wapentake is a little obscure.
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
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The people, in imitation of their ancestors, the ancient Germans, assembled there in arms; whence a hundred was sometimes called a wapentake, and its courts served both for the support of military discipline and for the administration of civil justice. [
The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part A. From the Britons of Early Times to King John David Hume 1743
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Tolkien seems to use only the modernized form; at least I haven't found an actual "wapentake" in my copy of LOTR, or in the few reference works I have taken out of storage; nor in "Unfinished Tales" or, or parallel passages "The History of Middle Earth."
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
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Tolkien seems to use only the modernized form; at least I haven't found an actual "wapentake" in my copy of LOTR, or in the few reference works I have taken out of storage; nor in "Unfinished Tales" or, or parallel passages "The History of Middle Earth."
Defending the Tolkien Snobs Richard Nokes 2005
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So what did Tolkien think that wapentake originally meant?
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
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My aside on Tolkien's use of wapentake has led to some really interesting and substantive posts at Gypsy Scholar and Wormtalk and Slugspeak.
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
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How many understand what Tolkien means by the wapentake, and how Tolkien's use of the term indicates what he thinks it must have meant?
Archive 2005-11-01 Richard Nokes 2005
reesetee commented on the word wapentake
Archaic; formerly used in North England and the Midlands. A subdivision of a shire or county corresponding to the hundred.
March 28, 2007
chained_bear commented on the word wapentake
"The five wapentake courts were administered by the steward of Middleham who, as bailiff, acted in place of the sheriff of Yorkshire in the liberty."
—A. J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 113.
April 22, 2014
MVB commented on the word wapentake
On the subject of the derivation and definition of the word wapentake, the High School Confidential comment about family insignia is unquestionable. My own comment is simply an esoteric addendum. It involves James Joyce's use of wapentake in Finnegans Wake. You'll find the term on page 30, where Joyce draws the poor reader into an absurd account of the etymology of the main character's name. His first name is Harold or Humphrey, and we don't know which. If we even care to know, wapentake supplies a clue. The taking of family insignia is called heraldry. Yep, we move from obscurity to clarity by dint of a pun.
April 14, 2019