Fee and Fellow: An Unexpected Connection Through Cattle

At first sight, the English words fee and fellow seem to belong to completely different worlds. Fee means “payment” or “charge,” while fellow refers to a “companion” or “person of the same kind.” Yet when we trace their histories back into the depths of language, both words turn out to share the same ancient root.

 

The Old English feoh and Old Norse fé

• In Old English, the word was feoh, meaning “cattle, property, money.”
• In Old Norse, the corresponding form was fé, with the same meaning.

These are not coincidences. They are cognates, both inherited from Proto-Germanic *fehu “cattle, movable wealth,” which itself comes from Proto-Indo-European *péḱu, “livestock.” The idea behind this root was that cattle were the original form of wealth in ancient societies.

From Wealth to Fee

In medieval English law, feoh came to mean a landed estate or feudal property. Through contact with Anglo-French fief (from the same Germanic base), the modern English word fee developed. Today we use fee for “payment, charge, tuition fee, legal fee,” but behind it lies the old equation “cattle = property = money.”

 

From Wealth to Fellow

The story of fellow begins in Old Norse. The compound félagi meant “partner, companion,” literally “one who lays down property together” (fé = wealth + lag = to lay). When Norse speakers settled in England, English borrowed this word as felawe, which became fellow. The original sense was a “business partner in shared property,” which later broadened to “companion, colleague, comrade.”

 

Modern English Descendants

From feoh we inherit:

• fee, and its legal family: fief, feoff, enfeoff, feoffee, fiefdom, feudal, feudalis

 

From fé (via félagi):

• fellow, along with fellowship, bedfellow, playfellow, yokefellow, and many productive compounds.

 

 

Conclusion

The connection between fee and fellow shows how language preserves traces of ancient economies. Words that today describe money and companionship both go back to the same Indo-European root for cattle. In the minds of our linguistic ancestors, wealth and partnership were tied together by livestock. Fee and fellow are two modern reminders of that world.

 

(Please see the next link.)

https://wordstudy.tistory.com/1434

ENGLISH ROOT WORD: fee "livestock", "cattle" from Old English feoh