(13.127-30)

As well as being the inventor of many new words, Drayton was often the preserver of archaic ones. Though ‘recheat’ has survived as a noun, describing a horn-call blown to summon hunting dogs, Drayton is the last person to be recorded using it in the verb form from which the noun was derived.

By using a Middle English word that by the seventeenth century was already old-fashioned, it would seem Drayton sought to impart a sense of tradition to the pursuit of hunting. Yet, by providing an explanatory note, he acknowledges that the general reader is unlikely to know what the word means and is therefore also likely to miss its traditional resonance. The note itself does little to redress this, since it gives the reader no more information than s/he would have been able to work out from the context, perhaps demonstrating in fact a desire to draw attention to the word’s obscurity.