havoc

If you’ve ever come home to find your usually well-behaved (well, kinda) cavapoo has decided to redecorate the lounge using the stuffing from three cushions and the contents of the kitchen bin, you’ve seen havoc in action.

As a noun, ‘havoc’ describes widespread destruction, confusion or disorder. It’s the kind of chaos that doesn’t just happen; it’s wreaked. And it turns out that its origins are rooted in a specific – and actually quite terrifying – military command.

In the Middle Ages, ‘Havoc!’ was a formal cry used during a conflict. It signalled that soldiers could start plundering and looting, grabbing whatever the olde equivalent of flat-screen TVs and games consoles was, and generally causing as much mayhem as they liked. The command came from an Old French word, havot, meaning pillaging. During the 14th century, as French-speaking officers gave orders to English-speaking troops, the soft French ‘t’ was gradually hardened into the English ‘k’. This is probably due to something called folk etymology, which is when a foreign word enters a language and people subconsciously ‘correct’ it to something that already sounds familiar to them. In this case, that was hafoc, the Old English name for a predatory hawk – to a 14th-century soldier, the command to start looting and pillaging might have felt conceptually very similar to the action of a hawk swooping down to snatch its prey.

Havoc time (did you just read that as MC Hammer? Maybe that’s just me) was so destructive that it had to be legally regulated. In 1385, Richard II issued the ‘Statutes of War’, which specifically forbade shouting ‘Havoc’ without authorisation under penalty of death. So anyone who lost their head and got overly enthusiastic about being first to the lootfest would quite literally lose it for real shortly after.

The most famous literary appearance of ‘havoc’ comes courtesy of, you’ve guessed it, William Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony promises to ‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’. Today, we use ‘havoc’ for much lower stakes, though I’m fairly certain my dog still hears the 14th-century call to arms the second the front door clicks shut behind me.

muster

These days, most mustering is about courage or passing: ‘I mustered the courage to speak up’ or ‘that comment doesn’t pass muster.’ But originally it referred to a formal gathering of troops for inspection. Medieval armies would call all their soldiers together to check no one was AWOL, and that they were all properly armed and fit for duty – and that was called ‘a muster’.

14th-century ‘muster rolls’ show sheriffs and commanders doing just that: assembling the county’s able-bodied men, checking weapons and recording who turned up (muster rolls are not to be confused with roll calls, which are when someone reads aloud the names of the people on the muster roll to check who’s there).

‘Muster’ has other military uses too – when a military unit is created, it’s ‘mustered in’, and when it’s disbanded, it’s ‘mustered out’.

This is of course where we get the phrase ‘passing muster’ from, which has been around since the late 16th century, although then it was ‘pass the muster’. It wasn’t long until we dropped the ‘the’, and started using ‘muster’ in a more figurative, non-military way to mean ‘to gain acceptance or approval’.

‘Muster’ comes from a Latin word, ‘monstrare’, which means ‘to show’. This passed into Old French as ‘mostrer’ and then into Middle English as ‘muster’.

During Jubilee years, British armed forces perform a muster for the king or queen. This tradition dates back to Tudor times, and gives the military a chance to show the monarch what they do and what they look like. The 2012 Diamond Jubilee Armed Forces Parade and Muster was the first time all three service branches were present at the same time to celebrate Elizabeth II’s years on the throne. 2,500 servicemen and women took part in it, and it was the first major event of the Diamond Jubilee.