Couple of factual Q.s inspired by P.G. Wodehouse--"Lemon colored"

Factual Questions
1

Did lemons used to be some totally different color? I ask because in at least a couple of stories, Wodehouse uses the term “lemon-coloured” to describe a cat’s fur (1920s), and the color of a person’s hair (1948). I have never, ever seen a person with lemon colored hair. I cannot even imagine that color in a human being’s hair. And I have certainly never seen a lemon colored cat. Orange cats, certainly. Strawberry blond-ish cats, definitely. But of any feline bearing the remotest semblance to Citrus limon, I have never seen the slightest hair or trace.

My other question concerns the power of rural landowners to bestow vicarages on local parsons. A prominent supporting character in several Wodehouse novels and stories is Harold Pinker, the local curate of Totleigh-in-the-Wold. One gathers that, after graduating from the divinity course at Oxford, one joined the Church hierarchy at the bottom, that is, as a curate, and then had to work his way up to vicar. Vicarages seem to have been locally prestigious positions, in that they put you in socially with the local Brahmins, as it were, and more importantly, often got you a nice house and domestic help. Several stories concern themselves partly with whether the local squire Sir Watkyn Bassett will give Pinker a vicarage, or having given it withdraw it in a fit of temper. Why and how did the local squires have this decision making power? In one story, Pinker’s fiance (also Sir Watkyn’s niece) says her uncle “has vicarages in his gift, and we’re hoping he’ll give one to Harold.” Can someone parse that out for me? What does it mean to have vicarages in one’s gift? I thought at first that it was just some figure of speech, but from further reading it appears that to have something in one’s gift had some sort of definite, legal meaning. FWIW, the Sir Watkyn character is also a Justice of the Peace, although whether that somehow derives from his squirehood, or because he used to be a London police magistrate, I don’t know.

2

Here is a photo of lemons.

Here is a photo of a yellow cat.

Here is a photo of Frederic Leighton’s painting The Maid with the Golden Hair.

Certainly they’re not exactly the same shade, but I think they’re close enough to give you an idea what Wodehouse means when he speaks of hair or fur as “lemon yellow”, especially considering that he’s in the business of exaggerating for humorous effect.

Yes, many private landowners possessed legal control over what were called “benefices” or Church “livings”: that is, they had legal rights to appoint the recipients of salaried clergy positions in their parishes. Sometimes these positions were awarded via explicit commercial transactions, where the family of a newly ordained minister would pay to get a clergy appointment awarded to him. Sometimes the holder of the living treated it as a sort of public trust, where he had the right and responsibility to appoint the clergyman but did not accept money for doing so.

3

Whoops, that link to the yellow cat seems to be broken: try this one.

4

In the Church of England, the right to appoint rectors and vicars (advowson) is a hereditary property right, and while it can be held by bishops or the Crown, it can also be held by private corporations or individuals. It’s an old right in English law that comes with the founding of a church…the idea was that the patron founding the church had the right to appoint the officials of the church. More and more of these passed into private hands after the English Reformation and the dissolusion of the monastaries, where the advowsons they held were sold or given to Crown favorites.

So, basically in the story, Pinker’s fiance knows that her uncle owns several advowsons, and she hopes he’ll name him vicar in one of the parishes he controls.

5

A squire is the person who owns most of the local land.

A vicarage is a house close to a church, where the minister lives.

To say that the squire has several vicarages in his gift means that he owns a lot of houses, some of which are vicarages, which he allows vicars and curates to live in, if they win his favour.

6

In the U.S. we’d call that cat an orange tabby. I can’t imagine anyone referring to it as yellow in any sense of that color.

Same for the hair, which is orange or golden red. Even for the most comic effect, lemon would not be applicable. See the difference here.

7

Can’t see this…error 403

There would have to be something wrong with a lemon if it looked anything like that. The hair is more like a blood orange, don’t you think? Or even, I’ll allow, gold itself, as suggested by the picture’s title.

He does exaggerate, but not in that manner. When a character whom a butler has just handed an alarming message says that he sees not so much a butler as a heaving mist with the vague suggestion of something butlerine in it*, he is starting from a grain of truth–there really is a butler there. When he says that Lady Constance eats broken bottles and conducts blood sacrifices by midnight–again, Constance is an imperious and overbearing grande dame who gives grandes dames a bad name. By contrast, to call someone’s hair or fur lemon yellow just doesn’t seem funny to me; rather more as if lemon colored meant something quite different to the author…

How did it end, or does it still go on?

8

Not to get too deeply involved in a dispute about what is after all only a comic adjective, but that sidewalk-chalk-yellow hair on the painted plaster statue in your linked photo is much brighter and less golden than the actual lemons in my linked photo.

Click the two links and move the windows so that they overlap with the hair and lemon right next to each other, and you’ll see the difference. IMHO, even the color of that tabby cat in the other link is closer to the color of an actual lemon than that statue’s hair is.

9

Now that does seem more like an orange. I can’t imagine why he didn’t say orange colored. AFAIK everyone calls those cats “orange tabbies”. And on people I think most of us would say it’s a shade of red. At least now it makes a little more sense with respect to the human character.

10

Who’s “we”? AFAICT, the person who took the cat photo is also US-based, and he labeled it “Yellow cat” in the caption. I think your yellow needs to be more mellow.

11

You probably simulposted, but I now have an indisputable “we” right here in this thread. :slight_smile:

12

When did “orange” become a color? IIRC, it was around 15something, during the reign of Henry VIII. Is it conceivable that “yellow haired” and “yellow cats” were merely a somewhat poetic holdover from the days when something that we’d call orange was called yellow, red or yellow-red?

I mean, yeah, it had been 300 years by Wodehouse’s time, but how long do you think we’re going to hang on the phrase “dial a phone”? Already my kids don’t understand where that comes from.

13

The fact that we call it “red hair” and not “orange hair” suggests that we can and do hold on to older color-phrases. On the other hand, I think “yellow hair” (tow-headed, etc.) has always been reserved for blond(e)s, not redheads, and I’ll join the chorus of people utterly confused by lemon-yellow cats and people.

I tried google images, but “lemon-yellow cat” brought up mostly semiprecious stones, and “lemon cat” brought up… well, suffice it to say that there are a surprising number of people who decorate their pets with outfits made of lemon peels and post them online.

14

In “1984” Winston Smith remembers oranges as being “yellow and so sour it set your teeth on edge to smell them.”

I don’t know if Orwell wrote that deliberately to show that Smith didn’t remember things from the old days so well, or if oranages are different in England.

15

An unquestionably yellow cat.

16

I assumed it was another example of the government redefining something to fit their needs. In this case, oranges are now called “lemons.”

17

Very interesting stuff about vicarages here, and in other posts. But can anyone parse out the phrase in his gift? Was the gift thought to be from somebody, perhaps God, or is it an obsolete use of the word gift meaning approximately the same as “property” or “holdings”? Some old words do change over the centuries and across related languages where they appear as cognates. “Sell” in Old English meant “give”, and Spenden in German means to donate. Gift also appears in German, where it means “poison”.

18

Have you checked a dictionary? In my Webster’s New Twentieth Century, Unabridged Second Edition (1970), the *first *definition of “gift” is “the act, power, or right of giving or conferring; as, the office is *in the gift *of the mayor.” The more common meaning of “a thing given” is the second definition.

This usage seems more common in England than the U.S., where fewer vicarages, offices, etc. are left to the discretion of an individual to bestow. But it is a standard definition of the word, and not all that old or all that obsolete.

19

The right of appointing the local vicar, correctly called the advowson, was granted to corporations (this is not strictly true it usually had to be purchased) - also previously mentioned, but it does not give you any real ideas of the importance of this right.

The parish vicar was a very important person, and had the right to make further appointments to various committees and town bodies, including the oversight of the poor funds, and also had a part to play in appointing the town council.

Usually the vicar would be able to appoint around one third of the council from local clergy- the aldermen etc, and this was a crucial position, as it often meant the vicar could hold the balance of power in many town councils between the merchants and the landowners.

You could not get yourself appointed to the living as vicar unless you had certain views, but equally the local vicar could only be removed, if at all, by senior church officials. Once you had appointed the vicar, that was it, you were stuck with him, so it had to be right first time.

Put plainly, everyone wanted a vicar who would do what they were told, but since it was such a powerful position, it was better to arrange things so that this person was part of a local wealthy family - keep all the power in the hands of the controllers - whoever they were.

The advowson was generally owned by absentee senior clergy, who often were not all that interested in the appointment, acting on the recommendation of the local squire or whoever held the manorial rolls, but in towns and cities, such a position of power had commercial value.

The advowson would be purchased at very great expense by the local councils when they became incorporated, hence the term corporation to mean town council.

For the corporation, it meant that they could effectively control all appointmemts to the various town officials positions, remember there was no such thing as a local election so the faces only change when someone dies and a new appointment is made by the self serving corporation.

Some City Corporations did not have any other access to national power in terms of members of parliament, but they often wanted more regional power, to control trading etc. Having a total control of the local Corporation meant you could pass local by-laws which would do things such as set apprenticeship rules, control the quality of goods, decide who would be allowed to become merchants and many other things.

This total control made immense differances, at one time the two major trading wool and cloth towns in England were Leeds and Wakefield - with Wakefield being the foremost. (and this represented around one third of all the monetry value of Englands exports) These two towns are no more than 30 miles apart and make an interesting study in Civic politics.

That total control of the Corporation in Leeds allowed it to undertake activities such as canal building - which required a huge amount of money and ultimately meant that Leeds forged ahead to become Englands fifth largest and most prosperous city, and for Wakefield to fall back into a middling sized city with much less regional importance in terms of trade, finance, just about anything you can name.

By the time you speak of, the advowson was still important, however nothing like as influential as perhaps during the Georgian period, in some country estates, the local church was still entitled to a tithe from all the farms in the area, which meant a reasonable income.

In Leeds during the 1920’s and 1930’s the local vicar was influential enough to have large chunks of the city demolished due to unhealthy housing and other notorious slum areas.

There is much more of just how the advowson and the local vicar had the ability to wield power and huge influence locally, in a little country estate he would be one of the most imprtant people in the area, and a local squire would have had to have extremely good connections to be able remove him at will, most likely in the House of Lords and in the senior church hierarchy.