It seems that hue could mean any cry, or even the sound of a horn or trumpet - the phrase hu e cri had a Latin equivalent, hutesium et clamor, “with horn and with voice”.Īs an etymological footnote, the Old French huer survived in Cornwall right down to the early twentieth century. This came from the Old French hu for an outcry, in turn from huer, to shout. This mysterious word hue is from the first part of the Anglo-Norman French legal phrase hu e cri. The laws relating to hue and cry were repealed in Britain in 1827. The same term was used for a proclamation relating to the capture of a criminal or the finding of stolen goods. If the criminal was caught with stolen goods on him, he was summarily convicted (he wasn’t allowed to say anything in his defence, for example), while if he resisted arrest he could be killed. Everybody in the neighbourhood was then obliged to drop what they were doing and help pursue and capture the supposed criminal. If somebody robbed you, or you saw a murder or other crime of violence, it was up to you to raise the alarm, the hue and cry. There wasn’t an organised police force and the job of fighting crime fell mostly on ordinary people. Our modern meaning goes back to part of English common law in the centuries after the Norman Conquest.
As a result, you sometimes see the phrase written as hew and cry. A This idiom, meaning a loud clamour or public outcry, contains the obsolete word hue, which people these days know only as a slightly formal or technical word for a colour or shade.
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