- raven; carrion crow; rook. This is one of many Scots words of Old French origin, deriving from corb or corbin.
Although there is variation regarding which member of the crow family the word refers to, there are some quotations which make the writer's intention clear. The presence of large numbers of corbies in trees suggests a rookery in Seton Gordon's Hill Birds of Scotland (1915):
D'ye ken the hoose o' Sir William Forbes,
Surrounded by trees a' black wi' corbies.
By a process of elimination, we can infer that the following quotation from William Stewart's massive Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland (1535) uses corbie for the carrion crow:
Baith ravin and ruik, with corbie, ka [jackdaw] and craw [hooded crow],
Biggit nestis and eggis laid thairto;
but there is no doubt that the next quotation, from Richard Holland's The Book of the Howlat (1452), refers to the raven, as we know from the story of Noah:
How, corby messingere,... Thow ischit owt of Noyes ark & to the erd wan [reached land],
Taryit as a tratour and brocht na tythingis [tidings].
The failure of the raven to return to the Ark has given us the phrase corbie messenger for any dilatory or unfaithful messenger.
Another common phrase is a gone corbie for a person who is beyond medical help:
At the lang hinner en' the doctor tell't... that he was a... gone corbie, an' that he would ha'e to put his hoose in order
(JOSEPH WAUGH Cute McCheyne 1917)
The stepped coping of gables, characteristic of much fifteenth-century Scottish architecture, is known as corbie steps.
Most Scots school children know the sinister ballad of The Twa Corbies:
As I was walkin all alane,
I heard twa corbies makin mane; [moan]
The tane untae the tither say,
"Whaur sal we gang and dine the day?"
"In ahint yon auld fail dyke, [turf wall]
I wat there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair."
"His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's taen anither mate,
Sae we may mak oor dinner swate."
"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane, [collar bone]
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek oor nest an it growes bare."
"There's mony an ane for him maks mane,
But nane sal ken whaur he is gane;
Ower his white banes, whan they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair."
The corbies may pick out the eyes of a knight, but there is a degree of honour among crows as among thieves, if the proverb cited by Andrew Henderson in Scottish Proverbs (1832) is true:
Corbies dinna pick out corbies' een.