At present we shall present, as a present, the puzzling past and present of “present.”
The origin of the word “present” is not presently known for sure. It might have come from French, or it might have been formed all on its own in English. There was an Old French word “present,” but there was also an Anglo-Norman word “present” that could very well be older. It’s really all the fault of the shoddy record-keeping that was so typical of the 12th and 13th centuries. In any case there was an earlier Latin word “praesenti” that’s most likely the basis of the present “present,” or at least one version of it.
The “present” that means “right here right now” was around in the 1100s as “en present” in Anglo Norman. The version of “present” that means an offering (or “to offer,” in its verb form) was also around in the 1100s as “mettre en present” in Old French.
The word (or words) “present” has been around so long that the oldest citations can be difficult to read. Something called the Ancrene Riwle dates from about 1200 or so, and includes “Þilke þet he bledde fore nebrochten ha him to Present ne win. ne ale. ne water.” Although that’s borderline incomprehensible at present, it purports to be an example of using “present” in the sense of a gift or offering. The way that sense of “present” was originally used was tightly coupled with the “presence” of the person doing the presenting; an offering that you didn’t hand over in person might still have been called a gift or offering, but it wouldn’t have been called a “present.”
“Presence,” by the way, might have simply been the plural of “present.” It didn’t come into use until about the 1500s, and seems to have been used that way: “I fele myself highly conforted and profytably counseiled through thi presentes [v.r. presence] and speculatyue probacions, for thei be ryght clere and apparaunt.” That’s from Traité del l’Esperance, written around 1500 and translated in the 1970s — the bracketed comment is from the translator.
The idea that “present” refers to both people and things that are immediately at hand comes along around the 1500s or so. Shakespeare made ample use of it in several of his works, although Thomas Reid has the best summary, in his 1764 book An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the principles of Common Sense: “That immediate knowledge which we have of our presents.” You can tell that he meant “everything in your immediate vicinity” rather than “your arrival” or “your stack of birthday gifts” because by 1764 “presence” had diverged enough from the plural “presents” to be its own word. Of course, we’re assuming that Reid was more careful about spelling than some were in the 1700s, but come on, he wrote a whole book about common sense!
It seems to have taken a few centuries after 1100 for the notion of “the present time” to percolate into usage of “present.” The first appearance of the word used like that is in Chaucer, but not, for a change, in Canterbury Tales. Instead it’s from The romaunt of the rose, from about 1425: “She wepeth the tyme that she hath wasted, Compleynyng of the preterit, And the present, that not abit.” For a few centuries it was common to use “present” in a similar sense to mean specifically the present month, but nobody has used “present” that way since about 1700 or so. It used to be common to say, as the The Earl of Leicester wrote a 1585 letter: “Your excellences letter dated the 19 of this present.”
Another obsolete usage of “present” — and a particularly confusing one — was to use “present” not to mean the “here and now,” but the “there and then” — that is, “somebody else’s ‘present.’” There was a phrase “his present” that at least gave a clue to what “present” was supposed to mean. You can find that in the York Plays from about 1450: “What wolde þou, man..In þis present, telle oppynly.” Another way to express it is “that present”: “[He] wold not be spoken withall that night, nor this daye untill nine a clock in the morning, so as they departed for that present.” (1548).
And of course there were grammarians as well, in Medieval Europe as well as in classical Rome. One of the important senses of “present” in English, Latin, Old French, Anglo Norman, and everywhere else has been, since the beginning, “present tense.” The Old English Grammar by “Ælfric of Eynsham is the earliest version (after the ones from Rome itself): “Sume word habbað gelice praesens, þæt is andweard, andpraeteritvm: odi ic hatige and odi ic hatede.”
The Ælfric who wrote the Grammar, by the way, was an abbot born in 955, who may have been something like the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was well enough regarded that in 1842 the Ælfric Society was formed in London and published several volumes of the old monk’s work. Forming a society to publish specific scholarly works was the way it was done in England in the mid 1800s. They were also called “book clubs” and “printing clubs.” The way it worked was that you paid an annual fee and in exchange you had a subscription to whatever the society published (or at least your membership made you eligible to buy the publications at a reduced rate). There were various arrangements for what you paid and what you got. Clearly the best ones were those that published on an irregular schedule. As a member, every so often you’d simply receive an unexpected package in the mail, which at that point in history you’d call a present!
