Vehmic Court - Etymology

Etymology

The term's origin is uncertain, but seems to enter Middle High German from Middle Low German. The word vëme first appears in the Middle High German literature of the 13th century as a noun with the meaning of "punishment". A document dated to 1251 has the reference illud occultum judicium, quod vulgariter vehma seu vridinch appellari consuevit. ("It is hidden justice, that by common fashion is habitually referred to as vehma or vridinch.")

The general meaning of "punishment" is unrelated to the special courts of Westphalia which were thus originally just named "courts of punishment". But as the word entered the Southern German dialects via Saxony and Westphalia, the word's meaning in Early Modern German became attached to the activities of these courts specifically.

Jacob Grimm thought that the word is identical in origin to a homophonous word for the raising of pigs on forest pastures (Hutewald), just as the more familiar German Zucht can mean both breeding and discipline. Grimm considers the spelling with h unetymological in spite of its early occurrence in some 13th century documents, and hypothesizes a "lost root" "fëmen", connecting with Old Norse fimr and conjecturing a Gothic "fiman, fam, fêmun?".

During 18th to 19th century Romanticism, there were various misguided attempts to explain the obscure term, or to elevate it to the status of a remnant of pagan antiquity, scoffed at by Grimm's entry in his Deutsches Wörterbuch. A particularly fanciful etymology, suggested by James Skene in 1824, derives the word from Baumgericht (Lit. 'Tree law'), supposedly the remnant of a pagan "forest law" of the Wild hunt and pagan secret societies.