Liege and Allegiance: The Connection

A year-ending thought.

I've been thinking about an old medieval French term, with Latin roots: "liege". At a King Richard's Fair, one costumed character may bow to another and call him "my liege". It is akin to saying "my lord," but not exactly, and a variation is to say "my liege Lord" -- which makes sense in a feudal system, where there is only one particular Lord to whom I owe allegiance - the rest are more or less a matter of indifference to me, a humble serf or page or whatever -- so you can be a lord without being MY lord, or you can be my liege Lord.

And, thinking thus, I experienced a bit of a semantic epiphany. Liege. Allegiance. The second syllable in the second of those words sounds a lot like the first of those words.

The gravest of sins, the one that gets you assigned to the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest final circle of the Inferno according to Dante, is betrayal. Betrayal, specifically, of one to whom the sinner in question owed al -liege-ance.

The two words much have existed in my head for decades without interacting adequately for me to see the presence of the one in the other.

Now I know. Carry on ... world.

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