worms

Today I'm going to do two short posts  instead of a single longer one.  Starting at page 92 of The Compleat Angler, Walton writes about bait, and he begins his discussion with worms. Among them he mentions the brandling, which is used in trout-fishing. 'The best of them,' he says, 'can be found in the bark of the Tanners which they cast up in heaps after they have used it about their leather.' (Piles of tanners' bark are no longer to be seen in British towns and villages, of course, and I wonder if the brandlings miss them.) In 1766, Richard Bowlker published another fishing manual under the title The Universal Angler, and his comments are similar, although perhaps a little more lyrical:

The Brandling is a very beautiful worm, streaked from head to tail in round ringlets, one streak being red and the other yellow. He is chiefly found in dunghills consisting of horse dung and hogs-dung mixed together, and you may sometimes find very large ones among the shavings of curriers leather mixed with a little earth: but hog's dung and horse dung mixed breeds the greatest quantity.

I'm struck by the idea that a worm can be 'very beautiful', and, in fact, the name of the creature also suggests close observation and an appreciation of its alternating red and yellow bands. A 'brand' is a 'piece of wood that is burning on the hearth'. (The word had the same form in Anglo-Saxon.) So a 'brandling' is a little piece of burning wood, just as a duckling is a little duck and a gosling a little goose. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't mention any uses of the term before the fishing manuals of the 1650s (although that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't in use before - just that there isn't an extant written record).