A recent thread about an old lyric contained the word "frith." The name of that other thread was "Origin: Fowles in the Frith (Middle English)".

The word frith intrigued me, so I looked it up in my unabridged dictionary from 1934. I was surprised to find about 9 column inches of friths and frith compounds. Reading it all gives us a view of life in long-past centuries.

I call doing this a ramble, because following the links in the word derivations is like going for a walk in safe but unfamiliar territory. It's fun. You just have to start with a rich word. Man or woman, say, or wisdom. Carburetor, not so much.   

(I am not going to quote the entries verbatim. That would be tedious.)
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Gradually I realized that there are two old words which happen to be spelled with the same letters. One frith comes to us from the north and has to do with water.   

1. frith: Middle English from Old Norse. See ford, cf firth fiord- a narrow arm of the sea, the opening of a river into the sea. A firth.

So a frith is a firth. This is a good example of how r's can move around in English words.

By the way, I have always wondered how the Firth of Forth got its name. If forth is a ford, then it's the firth of firth.
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The other frith is the one in the little poem first mentioned. It comes from the east, not the north.

frith - from ME, prob from Anglo-Saxon frithu peace, security, protection,

Definitions:
wooded country .
a tract of land grown with copse wood; a coppice,
a clearing in a wood.
unused pasture land.
coppice wood, esp. suitable for wattling

frith as a verb:
to fence in with wattle or underbrush
to preserve in peace, to help, to liberate (akin to German friede,
peace)

It's important to understand what a coppice is. Before people had good axes and saws, etc, they found it easier to deal with small tree branches, not big trunks. So they would cut down the trunk of a tree however they could and wait for the tree to send up shoots. In time the shoots would get thick enough to make a fence or a wall. A wood consisting of trees which have been treated in this manner is a coppice or corpse (same word).

For more solidity, you could fill the spaces between the branches with clay to make wattle-and-daub.

I have seen pictures of woods in England which were coppiced centuries ago. They still have the shape of shoots surrounded an old trunk.

These word derivations show that the old timers felt that once you had your coppice going and your homestead wattled, then you were safe. This may not be a naive as it sounds; probably getting all this done means that you are in a settled, co-operative community, and so you would be safer than otherwise. And so in the word frith we find peace and the woods (but not the dangerous, deep forest) intertwined.

There are some interesting compounds:

frithborh: a peace pledge

frithbot: a penalty or compensation paid for violating the peace.

[The dictionary didn't say whether this was a serious violation, such as a raid, or a misdemeanor, as when the harper gets wild and everybody has too much mead.]

frithgeard: an enclosed space. [I wonder if geard is yard]

frithles: twigs, sticks. [How did we lose track of this delightful word?]

Friththjofr: Icelandic. peacemaker. The hero of an Icelandic saga, prob. 13th or 14th C and of a modern poem in Swedish.   


So with this last entry, we see that good old frith has been a word for us from Anglo-Saxon times till the modern era. How long is that, a thousand years? Also with the last entry, possibly the only Germanic word that has two th's in a row.