[Ads-l] OED Confect, sense 4 -- Antedating and (long) Note

[Robin Hamilton]

The OED has, for CONFECT, adj, sense 4:

         4. 'Made up', counterfeit. :  1699   B. E. New Dict. Canting Crew   Confect, Counterfeit.

The obvious point to make about this is that the OED citation can be antedated, as the term appears in just that sense in a poem by Thomas Dekker, which begins with the line, "Bing out bien Morts, and toure, and toure," first published in 1612, where we find:

    "tick rome confeck" 

                _Lanthorne and Candlelight_, Ed. 2 [1612] (also known as _O per se O_),  O1v:.

What (one might naturally ask) is a "tick rome confeck"? and the answer is, simply, "a jibe well jarked":

        7.   And Iybe well Ierkt, tick rome confeck, 
                    for backe by glymmar to mawnd:
               To mill each Ken, let coue bing then, 
                    through ruffe-mans lague or launde. 

Dekker englishes this thus (O2v-O3r):

    7. A Licence got with counterfeit Seale, 
               to beg (as if vndone:
         By fire) to breake each house, and steale, 
               o'er hedge and ditch, then runne,

A Jibe is a seal, while a Jarkman was one who forged such seals.  Thus  "a jibe well jarked" is a cleverly forged example of such a notice, here a licence to beg.

So far, so good.

Dekker takes a clear example of a cant phrase, "a jibe well jarked", and then gives his own alternative version, to construct a "tick rome confeck" -- a ticket well (rum=good) confected.

At this point, one Richard Head inserts himself.  In 1665, Head published the first of what would be several volumes of _The English Rogue_.  There, he drew on an edition of Dekker's _Lanthorne and Candlight_ -- probably the posthumous 1648 edition -- to print (unattributed) Dekker's song, "Bing out, bien morts ...", and added to a glossary already heavily indebted to Dekker, the entry: "Confeck -- Counterfeit".

The material which Head took from Dekker in 1665 was reproduced and enlarged in his later _Canting Academy_ (1673), including the Dekker song and the definition of "confeck".  This volume was a major source for B.E.'s _New Dictionary of the Canting Crew_, which incorporated Head's definition of "confeck", changing the spelling from "Confeck" to "Confect", and adding the annotation "c.", for Cant.  It is this which emerges as the only citation for the word currently in the OED.

      In Randall Holme's _Academie of Armourie_  (1688), there is a similar definition -- "Confeck, Counterfeit" (Book III, Chapter III, p.168).  While this is independent of the Dekker-Head-BE transmission, it is still directly dependent on Dekker, since Holme's glossary at this point is that found in Dekker's earlier _Lanthorne and Candlight_, supplemented (as in the case of "confeck") with material from the body of Dekker's book outside the glossary there.

So:

The OED entry for "confect 4", cited from B.E [1699] is derived from Richard Head's 1673 entry in _The Canting Academy_, which in turn derives from Thomas Dekker, as originally printed in 1612.  The word "cofeck" as a cant term is thus simply a coinage on Dekker's part, and has no recorded currency outside a sequence of reprintings in the various cant glossaries drawing on Dekker.

Robin Hamilton

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