On brambles and blackberries

 Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, what are these called? If you come from Scunthorpe, or indeed from at least most places in pre-1974 Lincolnshire, they're called brambles, and you go brambling to pick them. It was only when leaving home to go to Oxford that I realised that most English people call them blackberries, and only the bush is called a bramble. 

I didn't think too much about this until I was in Vienna recently. [CRITIC: you managed to reach the second paragraph before mentioning Vienna.] Well, it's relevant.

Brombeeren? That's brambles, surely! Maybe we're using the older word?

Maybe - not. If you look in Old English, you see both blæc-berie and bræmel-berie, with bræmel as the bush. I wondered whether the names might have come from different parts of Germany or Austria, and somewhere I would find Schwarzbeere or some such. Well yes, you can find that usage in Bavaria. But sometimes Schwarzbeere means these - bilberries.

Anneli Salo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So I'm left scratching my head. It looks like we're using a very old word for brambles in Scunthorpe, but I can't prove it. How about looking at how widespread the usage of 'bramble' for the fruit is? I asked my friend Rob, who's from Ferriby. Not our Ferriby, you understand. North Ferriby. The one across the water in East Yorkshire. He says 'brambles', but it doesn't seem to be widespread in East Yorkshire. Maybe it jumped the water? [CRITIC: not even Jonathan Edwards could jump the Humber]. Figure of speech, but it doesn't matter. In the North East of England and Scotland, 'bramble' is apparently quite common.

Having seen just how much language has changed just in my lifetime, you never know whether a word has come into regional usage in the early twentieth century. Except you do, because we have nineteenth century dialect manuals. Specifically, we have Provincial Words and Expressions Current in Lincolnshire by Brogden in 1866, which gives us this gem:


So even if brambles isn't the same word as Brombeere, brame-berries is. At least in 1866, we were using almost the same word used in Vienna today. Maybe we're not so strange in Scunthorpe after all.