conyger

English

Alternative forms

• conynger, conyngry, cony-gry, conygry

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

conyger (plural conygers)

1. (historical) A rabbit warren; an enclosed piece of land set aside for breeding and raising rabbits.
   • 1876, Mackenzie Edward Charles Walcott, Benedictine Abbey of S. Aldhelm, Malmesbury, page 35:

     Mr. Stumpe pulled down other portions to make streets to house his workmen, so within a century after, the Tourist, whom I have quoted before, saw "only ruins of that large, spacious, strong, and famous abbey on the north side of the church, to manifest what her beauty was in her flourishing time." The buildings alone had covered six acres, and forty acres were occupied by the conyger or warren, the convent-garden, orchards, and meads.

   • 2004, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal - Volumes 124-126, page 248:

     Apart from a terse and unsubstantiated assertion in the obsure medium of a journal relating to part of East Anglia (Crompton and Taylor 1971, 119 note 17 -- i.e. obscure from a Derbyshire perspective anyway, and reciprocated in not 12 here), the most appealing interpretation of The Buries seems not to have been considered hitherto: viz., as a constructed rabbit-warren, or conyger -- as much in need of high and dry land as flattened ridge-and-furrow which, on some of the same air-photographs, can be seen to coincide with them.

   • 2009, Geoffrey Grigson, The Shell Country Alphabet: The Classic Guide to the British Countryside, →ISBN:

     Or conygers may consist of a single mound hundreds of yards long; as on one north Wiltshire manor, where the warren, in a Conegar Copse, adjoins the demesne of the long-vanished manor-house, a mound more than twenty feet wide, more than 300 yards long, and still four to five feet high. This conyger, where rabbits were reserved centuries ago, is still kept as a pheasant roost.

   • 2009, Douglas Crowley, The court records of Brinkworth and Charlton, 1544-1648, page 316:

     That, according to an order made at the last court touching the parrocks in the conyger, the homage, then sworn, assembled on 2 April last and allotted to each man for the parrocks in the way and form underwritten,

2. (dated, obsolete) The vagina. (Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this sense?)

Anagrams

• cryogen