By Vitaly
Vitaly runs Hush Hollow (thehushhollow.com), a small online store of field-guide-inspired apparel. Crows have a habit of turning up exactly when he is not looking for them.
Few birders would say it in the field. You say a flock, or eleven crows, and move on. And yet “a murder of crows” turns up in novel titles, band names, headlines and museum captions, and it is probably the only collective noun most people can produce after “a pride of lions”. For a phrase ornithologists rarely use in any technical sense, it has done remarkably well for itself.
The story you usually hear is that it comes from the Book of St Albans, printed in 1486 and traditionally attributed to Dame Juliana Berners. That book is real, and it does carry a long list of collective nouns, including an unkindness of ravens. What the surviving 1486 text does not appear to carry is the murder.
The Oxford English Dictionary points to a slightly earlier source instead, recording “a morther of crowys” around 1475 in the Porkington manuscript. The phrase was also printed by Caxton in 1476-77, in a collective-noun list appended to an edition of Lydgate’s The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose. These lists were not rare or precious. The Egerton manuscript carries 106 such terms, two Harley manuscripts hold 93 between them, and more turn up in the Porkington and Digby manuscripts. Somebody in fifteenth-century England was clearly enjoying themselves.
Here is the part I find more interesting than the usual folklore about gallows and battlefields. The OED attaches a quiet warning to its own entry, describing the murder as one of many alleged group names found in late Middle English glossarial sources. That is a lexicographer being polite about the possibility that somebody simply made it up.
It helps to remember what these lists actually were. They were a game. Alongside the birds you find a superfluity of nuns, a diligence of messengers, a gaggle of women. They were a display of vocabulary for people who wanted to sound like they belonged at court, and knowing them mattered socially in roughly the way that knowing wine or knowing football mattered later. Nobody was standing in a winter field, watching corvids, and arriving at the word murder through observation. Somebody was being clever on parchment.
So the phrase was probably never a description of crow behavior at all, which raises a better question than where it came from. Many of these terms disappeared from ordinary use. A murmuration of starlings survived. An exaltation of larks survived, helped along considerably by James Lipton’s 1968 book of that name. The rest are gone, and nobody says a shrewdness of apes today without checking a list first. Why did murder last?
The uncomfortable answer is that it happened to land near something true, even though the person who coined it had no way of knowing it.
Crows do gather around their dead. Kaeli Swift and John Marzluff documented it properly in Animal Behaviour in 2015, in a paper with the admirably plain title Wild American crows gather around their dead to learn about danger. A Seattle field experiment sent volunteers wearing realistic masks to handle a dead crow, and the local birds responded loudly and in numbers, and afterwards avoided both the place and the face.
The popular coverage called these funerals, which is the wrong word, though an understandable one. On the evidence, what the birds are running is closer to a threat briefing than a memorial. A dead crow marks a location where crows die, and possibly a face worth remembering, and the gathering is how that information travels through a population that is unusually good at holding onto it.
So the medieval joke and the modern data end up looking at the same scene from opposite directions. A fifteenth-century glossarist reached for the darkest word he could pin to a black bird, perhaps because it sounded good next to crows, and five centuries later a research team sending volunteers into Seattle neighborhoods in masks found crows genuinely assembling over a body, for reasons no one in the fifteenth century could possibly have guessed at.
The name is still wrong, of course. It casts the crows as the killers, when what they are actually doing is taking notes. But it is wrong in a direction that turned out to be worth following, which is more than anyone can say for a superfluity of nuns.
Cover photo (a flock of crows over a frozen field) licensed from Adobe Stock by author
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