Originally a place where grain was stored, a barn or granary, but in the pre-Dissolution period it was used of the outlying farms or estates held by the great abbeys.
The word ‘grass’ was commonly used in the past in the sense of pasture, as either a noun or a verb, and it had so many variant spellings that it can sometimes be difficult to recognise.
There is a reference to 'Hurdmannis et Bondis et Gresmannis' c. 1150, where the context makes it clear that a grassman was a certain class of tenant (OED).
This word has an Old Norse origin and it referred to an office holder, usually a manorial steward or churchwarden but applicable to a variety of other offices. It was current in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and possibly in other parts of the former Danelaw, where it regularly interchanged with ‘grieve’ and ‘greave’.
Some extensive manorial territories were subdivided for convenience into ‘graveships’, each under a ‘grave’ whose entitlement to the office was based on the amount of land that he held.
Green Ginger is the undried root of a tropical plant prized for its hot spicy taste and it was being imported into Yorkshire by the fourteenth century, possibly much earlier.
This was an English equivalent of ‘vert’ and could apply to the green parts of trees in the woods and forests: and making waste 'in the greene hew of the Forrest' in referred to in 1598 (OED).
The egg of a griffin, the fabulous creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It was a word for an oval-shaped cup, possibly made from a large egg, such as that of an ostrich.
The word ‘grith’, often metathesised to ‘girth’, meant peace or guaranteed security, and a sanctuary seeker in Durham would rap at the knocker on the door of the Cathedral asking gyrth for God’s sake (SS64/72). In Yorkshire, both Beverley and Ripon had similar rights.
We are accustomed to think of the grocer as a tradesman who dealt in spices, sugar, dried fruits and other items of domestic consumption but the term was not prominent in the fourteenth century, unlike 'mercer' and 'spicer', and in that period it more probably referred to an 'engrosser', that is a wholesaler: