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Now, I have had some experience of daisies since the days that I used to make them into chains while waiting to bat at rounders, and I am well aware that they are yellow, not red. I mean the ordinary kind that some folk call Bellis perennis. Why did Chaucer call them red?
It must be part of the general shift around of colour names that happens without anyone intending it. The word yellow was available to Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales he says: ‘This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex.’ But some things that we call yellow he called red. The same is true of Milton 300 years later. He was capable of calling a cowslip, quite correctly, yellow (in his song ‘On May Morning’). But the moment he gets to lightning it is red: ‘The thunder, wing’d with red lightning,’ we get in Paradise Lost.
If lightning was red until the early modern period, gold remained red longer. I know that some gold is reddish, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines yellow as ‘the colour of gold, butter, the yolk of an egg’ etc. Yet from before the Conquest, gold was conventionally red. Walter Scott, of antiquarian bent, followed the convention. ‘Stop thine ear against the singer,/ From the red gold keep thy finger,’ sings Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor (like a Liverpudlian, if she rhymed singer and finger).
It was not just in archaising poetry that gold was red. In the 19th century, a gold sovereign was a red ’un, and that strange man Arthur Morrison, half proud and half ashamed of his East End upbringing, makes Aaron Weech in A Child of the Jago talk to young Dicky Perrott about ‘sich a nice watch — a red ’un an’ all’ — the gold watch stolen from the bishop.
As I turned the pages, a grunting and roaring came from outside the window — my husband and the mower, as its motor came to life and began to cut green channels through the daisies.
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