Hi Don,

I have received the following email reply from Chris How in Australia and an extract from the same follows :-

Try CF Innocent pp176/177 for slate pegs. You may find the Romans used pegs to affix slates of stone or tile. Why the term trenail is used I guess is that the “peg” then fulfills another function, which is actually to effect a joint, against the peg, which is only to hang the slate or tile. The first settlement at Sydney in Australia used pegs thro cleft shingles, but these expanded when wet and cracked the wooden shingles, so there was an appeal to the motherland for shingling nails.

Nails go back to at least 3000BC so there is little point in asking why the word originated. We take “nail” from the Germanic/Norse root NAEGEL, whereas the French take “clous” from the Latin root, CLEVUS. The modern German word for trenail is DUEBEL, pronounced Derbelle, or T’derbelle. With some stretch of the imagination one could suppose that there is a phonetic shift from the Anglo-Saxon which would corrupt towards “trenail” given 1200 years or so. The Germans do not have a distinction between a peg and a trenail, so far as I am aware.

I read recently somewhere that the decorative head on spikes derives from their origins in timber which were left projecting and chamfered off or sculped out for appearance sake. These show in some German illustrations, but I know of no English equivalent. It may also be in Innocent.

There is a heritage woolshed in South Australia which has a red gum floorboards onto joists of red gum, all pegged together. Very unusual, even for Australia. So far as I know these are vertical holes and not angled. The driving–in process gives the tight fit required. There must be Medieval equivalents in UK of same.

There is a theory that nails derived from thorns used as pegs in the middle east, but the earliest illustration I have seen was a bronze age cast bronze nail. Fiona Keith Lucas may know what the ancient Egyptians used.

Most ship-board terms are straight Anglo-Saxon and convert across to specialized forms in mining/civil engineering terms such as “head-tree”. Can’t think of anymore at present.

C How


Looking back to see the way ahead !