The Norsemen of old never got a good press anywhere they went. No Doubt about it, they were hard chaws, and it is generally accepted nowadays that they gave us the word havoc, as is found in the expression `to cry havoc', which intrigues Mary Dunphy from Kilkenny. The word was introduced into French as havot, and into late Latin as havo. The Anglo-Normans spelled it havok. The origin of the word is obscure but it is first found in the Viking strongholds of Northern France as a word of command to a band of raiders giving them the go-ahead to pillage to their hearts' content. Oh, they were rough men, all right, but as Fergus Kelly shows in his wonderful new book, Early Irish Farming, (Dublin Institute For Advanced Studies, 750pp, £16 hardback) a work which can be thoroughly enjoyed by non-specialists, Ireland of the Welcomes didn't always greet them with cries of failte! when they came ashore from their longboats. The Annals of Ulster for 1013 tell us that one King Gilla Mo-Chonna of Southern Brega captured a band of them, and having yoked most of them to a plough, forced others to follow, harrowing from their scrotums.
The word lord the Anglo Saxons gave us: prince came by way of the Romans, and the -ess in princess came from France, by way of Rome and Greece. Mary Clune from Limerick was asking.
Lord, like his Lady, takes his name from bread. In the early Anglo-Saxon household a servant was called hlaf-aeta, eater of the master's bread: hlaf, which became our loaf, being the Anglo Saxon for bread. The master who supplied the bread was called hlaf-weard (loaf+ward, ward being a keeper). After a while the word was written as hlaford, and it eventually reached us as lord. Lady is from Old English hlaefdige, from hlaf+dig, knead.
From primus, first and capere, to take, the Romans made prin- ceps, the man who takes first. Princips became a favoured title after the Civil Wars which left Octavianus Caesar as top cat. He was afraid to offend people by calling himself King, but he enjoyed so much power that princeps inevitably came to mean a royal person. The English merely shortened the Latin word later on.
The-ess in princess is from Old French - essa, denoting a female person or animal, from Late Latin-issa, from Greek-issa.