A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
cockshut
Cockshut is evening twilight, the short window at dusk when there is still light in the sky but no longer enough to work by. It was ordinary English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and survives now in a few English dialects and in place names.
Etymology
The word looks as though it should refer to shutting up the chickens for the night, and dictionaries have suggested that. The better explanation is a woodcock. A cockshoot was a straight cleared lane cut through a wood, sometimes forty feet wide, and woodcock feeding at dusk fly low along any opening they can find. Hunters strung a net across the lane with a stone at each corner and pulled it down as the birds came through. Cockshut time was the time of evening the net was set, and the word for the hour outlived the practice entirely.
Notes
Shakespeare uses it in Richard III, where Surrey rides through the army at cockshut time. The Italian-English dictionary John Florio published in 1598 defines it by way of the old proverb about the hour when you cannot tell a dog from a wolf, which is the same idea as the French entre chien et loup. Cockshutt in Shropshire and Cockshoot Broad in Norfolk are named from the lanes.