‘It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing,’ George Orwell declared in Homage to Catalonia when he came across ‘a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint.’
He’d got it wrong. It wasn’t a harrow but a threshing-sledge, to be pulled by oxen or mules, to separate wheat from chaff. It was easier than beating the corn with a flail. The threshing could thus be done by old people and children riding on the sledges.
The sledges, now seen in museums, are called trillos in Spanish. They were still made in the 1950s, principally in Cantalejo in the province of Segovia. There were reckoned to be 300 working trilleros – trillo-makers – and a trillero’s family could make 300 a year. They knapped the flints expertly and rapidly, held on a pad on the left hand. A celebrated paper Los Trilleros (now online) was published in 1984 by Amparo Siguero. (Amparo is a woman’s name, from Nuestra Señora del Amparo – Our Lady of Refuge.) In addition to technical detail, it touched on their argot.
They were credited with picking up words in their long journeys selling trillos. Some saw them as medieval migrants from Bordeaux. Others said their argot kept their conversation secret from strangers, which I find as unconvincing as the same theory applied in the 19th century to thieves’ cant or later to Polari. A list of 353 words has been compiled of Gacería, the trilleros’ language. The trilleros called themselves briqueros, from their word brica, ‘threshing’. Some words of Gacería are said to come from Basque: gazo, ‘bad’, from gaizto, or pitoche, ‘small’, from pitotx. Guache, ‘one’, is said to be from Arabic. Arton, ‘bread’ resembles the Greek word, though its borrowing is not explained. In all, I suspect we have a collection of slang, sometimes playful, not the remains of a complete language.
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