A motley crew is a group of mismatched people, an assortment of different types thrown together rather than a uniform body. Motley was the parti-coloured cloth of the professional fool, so the phrase carries the sense of a patchwork. Cambridge Dictionary gives it as “a group consisting of many different types of people who do not seem to belong together”. The heavy metal band Mötley Crüe spells the same two words with umlauts.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Motley crew’?
Since at least the 14th century, ‘motley’ (with a variety of spellings) has been the name of a type of cloth made from two or more colours and, in later years, the name of clothing made from such cloth. There are several citings of motley in the late 14th century, including this from the Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:
“A marchant was there … In motlee, and hye on hors he sat.”
Etymonline dates the adjective to the same period: “late 14c., ‘parti-colored, variegated in color’ (originally of fabric), from Anglo-French motteley”, and it gives the noun, “cloth of contrasting mixed color”, from the late 14th century as well. Chaucer’s merchant is no clown. A modernised text of the Prologue runs the lines on as “A merchant was there with a forked beard, In motley, and high on his horse he sat, Upon his head a Flandrish beaver hat.” He rides high on his horse in a Flemish beaver hat, so the motley there is cloth on a man of business rather than a fool’s costume.
The best-known wearers of motley were jesters or harlequins and the patchwork costume became their standard style of stage dress, as in this painting by Frans Hals, circa 1620.
That association is what fixed the word. Etymonline glosses motley as “‘Diversified in color,’ especially of a fool’s dress”, and records it standing alone for the fool himself by 1600. Shakespeare was already using it that way. In As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7, Jaques describes meeting a fool in the forest and envies him his coat: “O noble fool! A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear.” A few lines later he asks the Duke outright, “I am ambitious for a motley coat.” It is the same scene that gives us ‘All the world’s a stage’, and the same costume behind ‘On with the motley’.
The other half of the phrase was doing two jobs by the time the two words were put together. Etymonline dates the sense of ‘crew’ as “any company of people” to the 1570s, and the shipboard sense, the company of seamen who man a vessel, to the 1690s. An 18th century writer reaching for ‘motley crew’ could therefore mean a mixed company of any kind, or a ship’s company in particular.
From the 17th century onward, any miscellaneous ragbag of undisciplined ne’er-do-wells might find themselves described as a ‘motley crowd’, ‘motley herd’, ‘motley assembly’ etc. Added to this list, but with no especial significance came ‘motley crew’. It may be that this was in reference to the crews of sailing ships, with the ‘motley’ being used to distinguish between an assortment of types, as distinct from a crew of disciplined and uniformed sailors. The earliest citation that I have found of ‘motley crew’ in print certainly refers to sailors. That’s in George Anson’s Voyage Round the World, 1748:
This ship they resolved, if possible, to carry to Europe… but their great difficulty was to procure a sufficient number of hands to navigate her. They endeavoured to supply this defect by pressing many of the inhabitants of Buenos Ayres, and putting on board besides all the English prisoners then in their custody, together with a number of Portuguese smugglers whom they had taken at different times, and some of the Indians of the country. With this motley crew (all of them except the European Spaniards extremely averse to the voyage) Pizarro set sail from Monte Video.
The 1748 first edition prints the phrase in the older spelling, as “With this motly crew (all of them, except the European Spaniards, extremely averse to the voyage)”. Anson’s list is worth reading literally. The men were pressed inhabitants of Buenos Ayres, English prisoners then in their custody, Portuguese smugglers taken at different times, and a party of Indians whose chief the book names: “The name of this Chief was Orellana, he belonged to a very powerful Tribe.” They sailed from Monte Vedio “in the river of Plate, about the beginning of November 1745”. A ship’s company assembled that way is motley in the plainest sense, because no two parts of it match.
With the associations of a ‘motley crew’ with indiscipline and garish costume, what better name for a heavy rock band? Mötley Crüe formed in 1981 and adopted the name. In the fashion of the time, like contemporaries Siouxsie & the Banshees and Enuff Z’nuff, they indulged in a deliberate misspelling. That fashion has passed now, but it’s unlikely that their bass player Nikki Sixx will revert to his given name of Frank Carlton Serafino Feranna, Jr.