helot one of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta.
Erasmus Erasmus Desiderius (about 1466–1536), Dutch humanist, scholar, and theologian.
brambles and bindweed and honeysuckle and convolvulus and teazles and the stuff which country people call sweethearts various types of wild plants.
fritillaries butterflies, usually having brownish wings with silver spots on the undersides.
Saxons a tribe of Germanic warriors who (with the Angles, another Germanic tribe) invaded parts of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries; here, the word is used by Robin Wood to denote those British people who resisted the Norman invasion of 1066.
Gaels the race of Gaelic-speaking Celts, displaced by the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries.
Circe the ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft; in The Odyssey, she turns unwitting sailors into swine.
griffin a mythical monster with the body and hind legs of a lion and the head, wings, and claws of an eagle.
Weyve a female outlaw.
stridulation the sound made by a grasshopper.
the book of Sir John de Mandeville (1371) a famous book of travels that also describes fantastic people and creatures that the author claims to have seen in Africa and the Orient.
a wattling of tripe a roof made of tripe, or cow's stomach.
chitterlings the small intestines of pigs, used for food, usually fried in deep fat.
mnemonic a short phrase or sentence used to jog one's memory, such as Every Good Boy Does Fine to recall the five notes (E, G, B, D, F) on the musical scale.
assonances rhymes ("what" and "wat").
