The word was first recorded in English by 1450, from Latin. It appears in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, in a line weighing whether Holy Scripture, or a revelation of its own kind, shows that poverty was a commandment to all Christians.
Latin had used the word by the sixth century, and Spanish had a form of it by 1414. English borrowed it straight from Latin, and in 1509 a memorial sermon for the Countess of Richmond said she kept the church’s appointed days. She also kept fasts of her own for Saint Anthony and Mary Magdalene.
Behind the Latin adjective lay a noun meaning ‘private property’, said to come from a word for ‘cattle’, which traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *peku-, meaning ‘livestock’. In ancient times livestock was the main form of property.
PECUNIARY and FEE come from that same root. PECUNIARY entered English by about 1500, from a Latin word for ‘money’. FEE goes back to an Old English word for ‘cattle’, and by the late fourteenth century it meant a payment for work.
