LYNCH
[Q] From Michael Gould: “According to Peter McCarthy in his hugely entertaining travel book McCarthy’s Bar, the word lynch may be derived from an event in 1493 when James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, strung up his own son from an upstairs window of his house for murdering a young Spanish house guest, who the young Lynch FitzStephen feared might become a rival for the attention of his girlfriend. Should we give any credence to this story?”
[A] At the risk of offending the citizens of Galway, I have to say the tradition is quite certainly false. Though the window still exists and has a plaque that commemorates the event, linguistic evidence alone is enough to scupper it. The tale seems to have been invented by an enterprising local with an eye to the tourist trade sometime in the nineteenth century, after the word had become widely known.
Lynch is short for lynch law, the punishment of a person for some supposed crime without bothering with the niceties of a legal trial. All the evidence points to its being an archetypal American expression. For its origin we must look to Virginia in the 1780s, during the American Revolution. There is some doubt about which Lynch gave his name to the expression, since there were two: Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County and Colonel James Lynch of Bedford County. However, both were trying to bring order and justice to an area notoriously lacking both. It’s William Lynch who is usually mentioned in scholarly discussions, mainly — it seems — because documentary evidence survives of his efforts.
It was only later that the term took on its associations with mob rule. And though it is now taken to refer to execution, usually by hanging, and most commonly in the twentieth century to the killing of black Americans in the South by whites, early examples suggest it referred to punishments that were less terminal. The compact drawn up with his neighbours by William Lynch in 1780 said of the actions of the lawless men troubling the area: “if they will not desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporeal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained”. “Corporeal punishment” (an older form of the more usual “corporal punishment”) suggests a good hiding rather than capital punishment.
The first appearance in print of the term that I know of is in a humorous article in The New-England Magazine of October 1835 under the title The Inconveniences of Being Lynched; the storyteller suffers being tarred and feathered on suspicion of being an abolitionist. Similarly, a news item in the New York Daily Express in 1843 refers to a man “lately taken from his house at night by some of his neighbors and severely lynched”, which sounds as though a harsh punishment was inflicted, but one falling short of death, since logic demands that it’s difficult to severely execute somebody.
Interestingly, some recent examples of the term in print have returned to this older sense.
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