recreant
Part of speech: adj
noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From Middle English recreaunt, from Anglo-Norman and Middle French recreant (“defeated”), from recroire (“to yield in a trial by combat, surrender allegiance”). Compare miscreant.
Inflected forms:
form: more recreant
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most recreant
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: recreants
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: Having admitted defeat and surrendered; defeated.
pos: adj
tags: archaic
poetic
examples: Soothly, he that despeireth hym is lyk
The coward champious recreant, that seith,
Creant withoute nede, allas! akkas! bedekes us
He recreant and nedelees despeired.
[Translation by Larry D. Benson from Riverside Chaucer: Truly, he that despairs himself is like the cowardly defeated champion, who says "I surrender" without need. Alas, alas, needless is he defeated and needless in despair.]
For, from the day that he thus did it leave, / Amongst all Knights he blotted was with blame, / And counted but a recreant Knight with endles shame.
[V]ictory is obtained if either champion proves recreant, that is, yields, and pronounces the horrible word of craven; a word of disgrace and obloquy rather than of any determinate meaning. But a horrible word it indeed is to the vanquished champion; since, as a punishment to him for forfeiting the land of his principal by pronouncing that shameful word, he is condemned as a recreant amittere liberam legem, that is, to become infamous, and not to be accounted liber et legalis homo; being supposed by the event to be proved forsworn, and therefore never to be put upon a jury or admitted as a witness in any cause.
gloss: Unfaithful to someone, or to one's duties or honour; disloyal, false.
pos: adj
tags: literary
poetic
examples: Who, for ſo many benefits receiv'd, / Turn'd recreant to God, ingrate and falſe, / And ſo of all true good himſelf deſpoil'd, […]
And let the recreant traitors seek / My tourney court […].
But, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest.
I charge it to the recreant sons of the men who carried on the American revolutionary war, and who come together every fourth of July to boast of what their fathers did, while they, their sons, have become associated with bloodhounds, to be put at any moment on the track of the fugitive slave.
Gabriel did not attack him however. He brought in only blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the mystic voice—it was really a remarkable case of second sight—which had whispered to him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town.
gloss: Somebody who is recreant, who yields in combat; a coward or traitor.
pos: noun
examples: [I]n the Choephoroe of Aeschylus Orestes pursues the same idea saying that unless he avenges his father, a stern duty which has devolved upon him, he will be punished in turn by the avengers of his father's wrongs. It may be remarked that in Maina to-day no recourse must be had to law for such cases, nor must the injured person satisfy himself by calling upon the aid of the police. To do this were incredibly base, the subterfuge of a recreant and a craven.
If Scholz believed he could dodge a reckoning after his party was beaten into a humiliating third place by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, he, like most recreants, is likely mistaken.
Derived words: recreance
recreancy
recreantly
unrecreant
Translations: