Yes, the bullock is definitely leaping, but what is the buck doing? If the two female animals (the ewe and the cow) are doing parallel things–calling after their little ones–why, of the two male animals, is the bullock leaping while the buck emits a Bronx cheer?

Here’s one solution: In the 13th-century manuscript where the poem appears, the word “ferteth” is actually spelled “uerteth.” That’s because back then, scribes often wrote the letter “v” as a “u.” So “uerteth” is actually “verteth.” And people often pronounced “v” like “f” (just as Germans do today in the word “Vater”), especially when a word began with a “v.” In fact, initial “v” and initial “f” were often interchangeable–and that’s why the word “ferteth” appears on the web page.

So some scholars have theorized that the author of the poem, looking around for a parallel activity to “sterteth” that also happened to rhyme with it, borrowed the Old French verb “vertir,” meaning “to turn” (a cognate of modern French “vertement,” meaning “vigorously”), and made up “verteth”–which could be translated as “leaps, twising”? This was only a century or so after the Norman Conquest, when most of England’s literate class knew French, so it’s a highly plausible theory.

So–did the author mean “verteth” or “ferteth”? The mystery remains unsolved.

La BellaDonna, she is glad she is not passing the buck anywhere it is icumen in.