Gaberlunzie noun a beggar
‘He … picked up a small china dish. It was filled with small metal rectangles; lead ‘gaberlunzies,’ badges issued to eighteenth-century beggars as some sort of license.’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
A gaberlunzie was a licensed or professional beggar; in later use a travelling tinker, a beggar in general. However, the first recorded example we have is adjectival, from Blairs Papers of 1649: ‘… hes layd asyde his pickestaffe [walking stick] and gaberlungy resolution [his resolution to go a-wandering]’. Later, in 1724, the sad fate of a gaberlunzie man is recorded by Allan Ramsay in his Tea-Table Miscellany: ‘For she’s be burnt, and he’s be slain, The wearifu’ gaberlunzie man’.
The origin is obscure, but one school of thought has it that gaberlunzie derived from two French words: gaban (a hooded cloak) and laine (wool), as licensed beggars generally wore this kind of coat.
By 1825, when Jamieson was compiling his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, he seemed to think that the word was becoming obsolete: ‘Gaberlunyie man. By some of the peasantry in Lothian this term is still used but confined to a Bluegown [generally the colour of a licensed beggar’s cloak], or beggar who wears the king’s badge…’. It still was used, perhaps only poetically, in 1861 by the Angus-based poet Robert Leighton: ‘twas the auld gaberlunzie lay dead in the snaw!’.
However, in 1985 Liz Lochhead used the word in her Scots translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe: ‘How [why], wi’ a’ your money and your name, You’d want a gaberlunzie son-in-law…’. And in 1986 Colin Mackay writes in Song of the Forest (giving a nod to the pedlar meaning - again it’s used as an adjective): ‘… you can have your heart’s desire of me, and I said please sir to stay up for the midnight fires and a gaberlunzie ribbon to tie up my hair with…’.
More recently, Val McDermid used it in 2020 in The Gawd Breeks: ‘The High Heid Yin near aboot rent his breeks lauchin. “There’s nae gowks in ma Big Hoose,” he tellt them. “That’s whit you hink, Maister,” the foremaist joukster said, bobbin like a gaberlunzie. “But wid ye no want tae ken if there wis?”’