Middle English gannock as a word, and in place-names

In 2016 I published two articles on this obscure word. In the first paper, I show that the perviously unknown word gannoken was used in Suffolk in the fourteenth century to mean `to brew ale in violation of local regulations'. I then argue that it is from this verb that we get the noun gannoker, meaning a person who gannocked. This word appears in the Middle English Dictionary and in the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning ‘taverner’' or ‘alehouse-keeper’, but if this is correct, it is an extension of the original meaning.

This article is online here (subscription needed for full access).

The second article discusses the place-name element gannock, which very likely originated as a name for Degannwy Castle in north Wales. The most import English example is in King's Lynn, and after that the name was used widely for many small places across southern England. There may be a connection to the word gannoken, but if the exact process is obscure. The ordinary word probably came from the place-name, rather than vice versa.

A draft form of this article is available online here. The content is identical to the published version in JEPNS (which is not online anywhere), but the pagination differs.

bibtex citations

@article{Briggs:gannoken,
  author= {Keith Briggs and Rosemary Hoppitt and John Ridgard},
  title=  {Middle English \emph{*gannoken} `to regrate'},
  journal={Notes \& Queries},
  volume= {63},
  number= {4},
  pages=  {531--532},
  year=   {2016},
}

@article{JEPNS-48-Briggs-Gannock,
  author= {Keith Briggs},
  title=  {Gannock in King's Lynn},
  journal={Journal of the English Place-Name Society},
  volume= {48},
  pages=  {28--39},
  year=   {2016},
}