Last night I watched Secret’s of Henry VIII’s Palace, a documentary about Hampton Court. (The party animal that I am!) The tour of the premises included the permanent residents of the palace’s Great Hall, known as “eavesdroppers”.

As shown in the photo here, eavesdroppers are carved wooden figures tucked into the “eaves”, the overhanging edges of the beams in the ceiling.

These curious characters were more of a warning than decoration. Eavesdroppers were gossip stoppers that smiled down on guests. Hampton Court was an enormous palace but with hundreds of residents, staff, and guests, space, and privacy, were at a premium. The walls had ears. In those Tudor Times of intrigue and unrest, where traitorous words could result in hanging, drawing, and quartering, or if you were lucky, just losing your head, these eavesdroppers were a grim reminder that you were always being watched and heard by courtiers and servants. In the Tudor court it was best to see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing.

“Eavesdropper” comes from the Old English yfesdrype, that meant, “place around the house where the rainwater drips off the roof.” The word appears around the 1500s as a name for people who lurked under the eaves of a house to overhear what’s going on inside. The verb form, to “eavesdrop”, didn’t appear until a century later, and is a shortening of “eavesdropper.” (This type of neologism is called a “back-formation” where a new, shorter word is created from an existing one, e.g., “burgle” came from “burglar”, and “diagnose” from “diagnosis”.)

Today, eavesdropping isn’t only about hiding behind the curtains as we can eavesdrop over the telephone (wiretapping), via email, instant messaging, and other methods of private communication. If a message is broadcast publicly, witnessing it doesn’t count as eavesdropping. We could also listen in to the guys at the next table in the pub bragging about their conquests of the previous night and call that “eavesdropping” because the conversation isn’t intended for our ears (or perhaps it is!)

Typically, eavesdropping has the connotation that we’re listening in secret, without permission or knowledge of the speakers. Eavesdropping also implies that we know the speakers, and are invested personally in what they have to say, which is possibly about us. Also, we’re probably not expecting to hear praise or compliments. As the old adage goes, eavesdroppers seldom hear anything good about themselves…

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