From Pablo Scheffer’s “Among the Rabble” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 20 · 6 November 2025; archived), a review of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki:
In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti drew a distinction between what he called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ crowds. Open crowds are what we tend to think of when we speak of crowds: spontaneous occasions where people come together with a shared if hazy purpose, temporarily suspending the normal order of things. Closed crowds, by contrast, are planned gatherings with a fixed motive. They solidify rather than disturb existing social hierarchies. One of the reasons the early Middle Ages tend not to feature in histories of the crowd, Bobrycki suggests, is that gatherings in this period were overwhelmingly closed. […]
Early medieval speakers of Latin inherited a trove of words to describe different types of crowd: populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex. Caterva and grex were both used to describe troops of men, but caterva originated as a military term referring to a band of barbarian soldiers, while grex, which had pejorative undertones, had been a word for a flock or herd of animals. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville expounded on the distinction between a ‘multitude’ (multitudo) and a ‘crowd’ or ‘rabble’ (turba). The former was defined by numbers, the latter by space: ‘For a few people can make up a turba in narrow confines.’ These nuances were being abandoned, however. Some writers were using turba not just for disorderly rabbles, but for hosts of angels and gatherings of monks; military terms such as legio and cohors lost their specificity and became synonyms for ‘many’. Even plebs came to be used simply as an alternative to populus.
As gatherings became more organised affairs, new words were needed. Germanic languages had inherited the word ‘thing’ (ding in German and þing in Old Norse), which originally referred to a local assembly – the kind where disputes were settled and collective decisions reached – but evolved to include the time or place of these assemblies, the discussions held and the agreements made. A thinghûs (‘thing house’) came to be anything from a legal court to a theatre; a thingâri (‘thing doer’) could just as easily be a preacher or a litigant. The noun thingatio even entered Latin through Lombard law, where it denoted public legitimisation.
Gotta love thingatio. (We discussed caterva in 2017; Y said “What an odd word, caterva. De Vaan’s dictionary doesn’t get very far with an etymology.”)
The distinction between multitude and crowd in Spanish disappeared some time after the gentleman from Seville.
Diccionario de Autoridades -Tomo IV 1734
Muchedumbre s.f. La copia, abundancia, y multitúd de una cosa.
Latín. Multitudo
Current edition of the Royal Academy dictionary:
Sinónimos o afines de «muchedumbre»
* multitud, aglomeración, gentío, tropel, oleada, tropa, tumulto, caterva, burujón.
Dictionary of Authorities – Volume IV 1734
Crowd n. The abundance, profusion, and multitude of something.
Latin. Multitudo
Current edition of the Royal Academy dictionary:
Synonyms or related words for “crowd”
* multitude, agglomeration, throng, stampede, wave, troop, tumult, mob, burujón.
And muchedumbre / multitud are a wonderful tadbhava-tatsama pair.
Another interesting thing-related Late Latin lexeme of Lombard origin is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gairethinx, which refers to a specific sort of “crowd.”
Clearly caterva and caterwauling are connected.
From JWB’s link: “It may have involved the entire army banging their spears on their shields; or it may have been a much quieter event.”
caterva
From Celtic somehow? Welsh cad “battle (< *kat-) can also mean “army, throng, multitude.”
Now I want a consensus among 7th-century Lombard scribes regarding the best Late-Latin rendering of:
“Hey you kids in the crowd /
You know you like it when the music’s loud.”
Which of the many many possibilities for “crowd” would be the mot juste? Bonus points if they can come up with a rhyming couplet in Latin without the word choice seeming too forced for the sake of the rhyme.
This paper now mentioned in the Wiktionary article for caterva actually adduces Welsh cad on slide 15 in support of its solution!
Interesting. (GPC doesn’t take cad back beyond proto-Celtic.)
It’s a case where a noun is suppletive for person:
We are a crowd.
You are a rabble.
They are a mob.
I’d like caterva to be related to quattuor, but I don’t know enough to propose how.
@David E.: While “we” are certainly neither a mob nor a rabble, we may not even be a crowd, which is already standing on the verge of being a bit pejorative. We are merely an informal gathering of concerned citizens. (It wasn’t us who threw that brick through the window – musta been an agent provocateur seeking to discredit us.)
Personally, I am a multitude.
You’re just a multitude? I contain multitudes. Or from another point of view, I don’t.
We are a crowd.
You are a rabble.
They are a mob.
You’re implying that mob is more pejorative than rabble? Debatable.
And certainly that would not be the case in Australia, where in certain contexts “mob” is very positive, much more so than crowd or any other related term.
Mob o’ Sheep
@AntC
The link to your JPEG image has so many characters that clicking on it results in a server error. Would it be possible to rename and/or relocate the file (part of the length seems to be from long directory strings, obfuscated in the same way as the file name.)?
Yikes! Apologies. The edit window has closed. This is a shorter URL.
Thanks, that works.
Populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex
You’ve given me several new etymons to explore! I’ve never heard any word in english resembling “caterva” or “grex”
Actually, “grex” is an English word, but it’s a specialized term used in biology (‘a multicellular aggregate of amoeba’) and horticulture (‘the progeny of an artificial cross from specified parents’). I’m sure, however, that you’re familiar with “egregious,” which literally means ‘standing out from the flock.’
And its opposite, “gregarious”.
“Congregation” is another.
So is aggregate
In Spanish the direct reflex grey ‘flock’ is hanging there, but barely; it’s entirely obsolete except in the religious sense
And “segregate.”
But not “Gregory” which basically just means “woke.” Excellent name.
(According to WP, it’s been folk-etymologised as coming from grex, explaining its ecclesiastical popularity. They don’t give any source for this assertion, though.)
so many characters: Actually something else was askew, the URL as first posted pointed to the Languagehat WordPress server itself, and that one is totally within its rights to complain about such an extremely verbose URL. (This can happen if your cut and paste missed the https://some.server.name part, because [getting technical] the default baseURL is that of the page being shown, without the last element of the path).
Most of the Western Oti-Volta languages seem to have borrowed the Arabic جماعة, via either Hausa jama’a or Dyula jàmà, for “crowd.” Mooré has the uplifting proverb
Sugr soab n so zãma.
“It’s the forbearing person who owns the crowd.”
The word seems to have kept the more elevated air of the Arabic in Moba, and also in Gulimancema:
Bado kuli leni o jama.
“à régime nouveau, un climat social nouveau”
(Literally, “every [new] chief replaces his entourage”, an age-old Gurma proverb about the US constitution.)