quickfall

1) Possibly haws collected for the propagation of quicksets.

I have found no reference to this word in dictionaries although it occurs repeatedly in early Yorkshire documents: 1391 ‘making 18 acres of ditch with whykfall around the said wood’, Wakefield

1457-8 Wmo Plumland pro colleccione de qwycfall ijd, Fountains Abbey

1474 quod nullus eor’ succid’ aliq’ boscu vel Whicfall infra dominum, Kirkheaton

1488 Agreed that … the fermours opyn ther yatts [gates] of thare furmolds … that no hurt be don upon the whikfall belonging to the same, York. It was said by J.T. Fowler to refer to the haws that fall from hedgerows in winter, or perhaps to the hedge itself. Since the Fountains Abbey accounts refer to collecting quickfall and transporting it he speculated that the haws may have been for the propagation of quicksets. In several examples though the sense of ‘hedge’ is clear, although there may occasionally have been confusion with ‘quickset’, as in a 1488 reference to a hege of whiksall [sic] late set … with whitethorn in York or a whiksatt hedge in Kirkham in 1556.

spellings whickfall
dates 1391 1457-1458 1474 1488 1556

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Photo by Kreuzschnabel CC BY-SA 3.0