ABSTRACT
The term Moerlemaeye, Mourlemai, or Muerlemaye makes only two appearances within Middle French documents, in 1296 and 1297, and there is only one reference in Middle Dutch, in the form of a 1331 charter from Bruges itself. Contemporary city accounts simply refer to it as a ceditio (sedition) while the first comital inquiry of 1281 called it the fait de Bruges (the event of Bruges). Charters from 1280, the year of the rebellion itself, speak in general terms about griefs, outrages, conspiracions, alliances (griefs, outrages, conspiracies, and alliances) and meffais (misdeeds).
It seems plausible, however, that the name Moerlemaeye, like Cokerulle, also dates from the time of the event and was used either by those who participated in the revolt or by their adversaries. According to one historian it may be derived from the combination of moerlen or moerelen (shouting out loud) and mayen (fiercely waving one’s arms), invoking the image of an agitated and noisy mob. Another scholar, however, interpreted moerlen or morrelen as a frequentative of morren (to mutter) while maye (or mye in a variant spelling) was supposedly a suffix to substantivise this verb. According to that etymology Moerlemaye would mean ‘the muttering’, as a pars pro toto for the entire revolt. Indeed, from an etymological point of view, the most plausible option seems to be that the Dutch murmelen (to mutter) was substantivised into murmelye (the muttering) and subsequently resulted in murlemye as a result of ‘adjacent metathesis’ (a linguistic phenomenon in which two contiguous sounds are switched).4
