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Author: Philip Colfox (private researcher)
Email: philip at holcot dot com
Date: 2007-06-22 20:27:51
Subject: colfox, kohlfuchs, koolvos, colefax, colfax
Chaucer's Nunn Priest's Tale "a colfox ful of sly iniquite that had in the bushes 3 yeares ywonen" (No other recorded use in English language apart from as a family name from 1200 to present)
Current usage in Germany "kohlfuchs" a horse (or other animal) colour probably dark chestnut. Fuchs means chestnut colour, but it also means fox.
Current usage in Holland "koolvos" as "kohlfuchs"
The English family name has been mispelled from 16th Century onwards in some variants including "fax"
In Icelandic and Anglo Saxon fax means hair or horse's mane.
So does Colfox mean "black chestnut", ""black mane", black hair", "black fox" or something else?
Many dictionaries wrongly describe colfox as a "crafty fox". J Leslie Hotson saw heraldic colours in the colouring of the animals in Chaucer's telling of the story of the Cock and the Hen (Chaunteclere and Pertelote) and identified Colfox as a coded description of Sir Nicholas Colfox who, working for Thomas Mowbray - the Earl Marshal whose baton was brown tipped with black - murdered Thomas Duke of Gloucester the King's Uncle in 1397. The colouring of a colfox would be full black like a normal black foxm not brown tipped with black as described by Chaucer - unless colfox means black mane.
Any ideas?