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roup n. sale or letting by public auction

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“roup n. sale or letting by public auction”

31st March 2008

Roup is still well-known in some sections of the media, particularly in the north-east, where it is often used in reference to sales of farming goods and equipment. In February this year, the Aberdeen Press and Journal discussed the launch of A Grain of Truth on DVD, "the personal and moving account of journalist and broadcaster Jack Webster, severing his last tangible link with the land by holding a farm roup on the farm of Honeyneuk, near Maud, where he spent his Aberdeenshire boyhood". Roup-related incidents reported in the Aberdeen Evening Express include the "farm roup lots stolen by thieves" in July 2007 and "a blaze at a North-east roup hall" in February 2000.

The noun is first recorded in Scottish sources dating from the late seventeenth century, and is derived from the verb roup, which had the original sense "shout, roar", but came to mean "the public announcement of an auction" by the fifteenth century. The word has at least two Germanic ancestors, Old Norse hropa and its Old English cousin hropan, both meaning "shout, call", and may also have been influenced by Old Norse raupa "boast, brag".

There were sometimes hidden agendas at historical roups. A letter written in Lanarkshire in 1771 describes how "The rouper takes care, before-hand, to employ one or two base-minded fellows, called Puffers, White-bonnets, or Decoy-ducks, who have orders to bid against you". In the nineteenth century, roupin often took place when poverty forced people to sell their property. Sometimes whole families would be roupit oot or roupit aff to a humbler dwelling. In his Poems and Songs (1861), John Barr wrote of "Poor folk roupit to the door, To pay the needfu’ laird". Roups were often tightly controlled, and according to the Encyclopedia of the Laws of Scotland (1927), "The auctioneer is ‘judge of the roup’".