"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/10/17 (falcone, tercel, lore)

I went to a National Trust house quite recently, and they had a falconry display, and it remind me again of all the terms that we have in English that came from this sport that was so popular in medieval times. Particularly after the Normans came over, and the Normans aristocracy broughn falconry with them. Knowledge of its vocabulary was seen as a real mark of the elite, if you like. It was a real badge of a social status. So much so, in fact, that one person described it as, "distinguishing a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villein". The villeins beign the servants that were attached to a villa, originally. But I just thought I'd give you  a quick whizz through some of the terms that comes from there. First of all, falcone itself goes back to the Latin for a sickle, because the sharpeness of the blade was said to be similar to the bird's hooked talons, if you like. The peregrine and peregrine falcon, that's from the Latin for piligrim, because they were often tracked on migration, as they were travelling, rather than in the nest. The male bird is called the tercel, and it goes back to the Latin tertius, meaning a third, either because the male is the third smaller then the female or, according to the legend,  the third egg in the clatch was said to produce a male bird. But perhaps the most surprising term of all from falcony rerers to a bunch of feathers with a bit of meat attached to a long string which was swund around the head of the falconer in order to recall the hawk. That's known as the lure. As I say, desined to attract the falcon so that it always returns. And a Norman nobleman would have called it "a lure". And of course that's where we get the idea of something that's powerfully appealing of mysteriously attrective today, the "allure' that has spilled into English mainstream. It goes all the wat back to falconry.