How ‘barley’ cropped up

‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood because his offer to come out of retirement to save the NHS had not so much been rebuffed as received with uneasy amusement.

It so happened that I had been rereading something that might fit the strange category of wholesomeness demanded. It was The Shell Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson (1905-85). Grigson really knew about the countryside, from the Stone Age onwards, and the writers who delighted in it, from Thomas Tusser to Cecil Torr. Anyway, Grigson’s entry for barns explains that the word derives from the Old English for ‘barley-house’, bere-ern. The ern part hardly survived into modern times, except in such compounds as brewern, ‘brewhouse’ or saltern, ‘place for making salt’. Ern was a product of metathesis (as waps turned into wasp), having once been ren and perhaps being related to rest.