Most people in the modern world see a lot of fenders every single day. Cars, after all, have four of them, and bikes often have one or two. But even assuming that the average American sees approximately 2,500 different cars every day, which would add up to 10,000 fenders, that’s not all the fenders you might see. There are at least 18 different things that are, or have been, called “fenders.”
In the early 1400s a “fender” was a person; a “defender”. In Middle English there’s an old, old reference to Alexander the Great as “Þe fendere of grece.” By the 1600s “fender” had acquired a very general sense of any sort of thing that “fends off”, the way a shield would protect a soldier.
The basis of “fender” is “to fend.” It’s a shortening of “defend,” which is quite an old word that comes from…well, partly it’s from the Latin “defendere,” but that was also a word in Anglo-Norman that might not be related to Latin. (Pro tip: everybody, no matter how expert they are, is basically guessing about the origins of many English words.)
It was also around the early 1600s that “fender” was adopted in nautical jargon to mean any sort of rope or other material that would be hung over the sides of a ship to protect it from damage from the dock, or even from large cargo being hoisted aboard. Landlubbers who ventured near the docs undoubtedly noticed these clever fenders, because by the 1700s a “fender” also meant a log or a board placed in front of a building to protect it.
Farmers got into the fender act too; by the 1800s a “fender” was an attachment for a plow or cultivator to keep clods of dirt from damaging nearby crops. It was about the same time that a writer in Centennial Magazine observed that fenders could be found in the animal world too: “The double fenders or brow-antlers [of the moose] do the most damage.”
By the time motor vehicles appeared, around the early 20th Century, some wagons had for decades had fenders over the wheels to protect from mud, and some of the first cars, which were mostly just wagons with motors, inherited fenders that way. But even people who didn’t have their own wagons still had their own fenders. Every house, and often every room, was heated with a fireplace. One of the problems with an open fire like that is that hot coals or even burning logs can roll right out into the room. The fenders in that case were various metal grates and guards were placed around the fire to try to ensure that you didn’t burn your house down while trying to keep warm.
Before the advent of motors of any kind, mills were powered by water or wind, and the water-powered version usually called for a dam. Because the water in most streams varies from one season to the next, a good dam-builder allowed for the dam to capture more water in a dry season, but let some of it escape when there might be a flood. The movable parts of a dam were called “sluice gates” or (you guessed˘˘ it) “fenders.”
In the 1800s there was a kind of a “fender” that was woven from leaves or reeds to protect a seal — not the animal; a seal for some kind of closure. Don’t ask me what on earth the context for that might have been; all I know is that Charles Boutell wrote, in 1864: “‘Fenders’ of this kind have been found attached to seals as early as 1380.”
On the other hand, maybe seals were trained to help gather sea-salt; John Collins wrote Salt and Fishery in 1682, and pointed out that “[Crude sea-salt is] carried in wicker Baskets or Fenders to Brine Wells.”
At this point we’ve barely dented the fender…I mean, scratched the surface…of the various kinds of “fenders” that have existed through the ages. But there’s another one that’s about as far from the fenders on a car as you can get. Josephine Tey’s 1931 novel The Expensive Halo mentions it: “Mother goes because the opera is the only place in London nowadays where you can wear a diamond fender without looking a fool.”
That particular passage doesn’t really explain what a “diamond fender” is, but there’s another one from Her Ladyship’s Conscience by Ellen Thornycroft Fowler in 1913 that makes it clearer: “‘Eleanor always says that when she puts on the Mershire diamonds she feels the respected shades of her ancestors-in-law closing around her,’ said Esther, still smiling; ‘and that with a diamond fender on her head and a diamond poultice on her chest a woman can face anything.’”
So a “diamond fender” is something a woman would wear on her head, at the opera, in the early 20th Century. It has to be a tiara! The term seems to have some into use a few years earlier, as in this passage from the Temple Bar magazine in 1893: “Presently she moved away with Lord Frederick in the direction of Madeleine, who had installed herself at the further end of the room among the fenders, as our latter-day youth gracefully designates the tiaras of the chaperones.”
Apparently young people (that is, rich young people) at the end of the Victorian era didn’t wear the tiaras themselves, but their chaperones so customarily did that the tiaras worked almost like a badge. Or maybe the tiaras worked more like actual fenders — and here the “actual fender” would be the protective grating around a fireplace: “‘I will wear what Jack calls the family fender,’ said Dodo. ‘Tiara, you know, so tall that you couldn’t fall into the fire if you put it on the hearthrug.’” That’s from Dodo Wonders, by E. F. Benson in 1921. Some of those tiaras must have been pretty impressive indeed.
