Hunchbacks

In William Shakespeare's Richard III, someone refers to Richard as “that foule hunch-backt toade.” It's the first recorded instance of the term for someone who had a less-than-straight spine, and—putting aside the question of whether Richard was "hunch-backed"—the term gets used in the literature of the next couple centuries to indicate a bad person.We know what a back" is, but what is a "hunch"? I once mentioned Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Order of Things), a 1240 work by a Franciscan scholar. It was a popular work that got printed and reprinted and translated for centuries. A 1398 English translation by John of Trevisa uses the word "bunch" to describe what Angelicas said about the back of a camel. A 1582 re-printing of Trevisa's translation made some changes to "modernize" the English says the Dromedary camel “hath a hunch on his backe,” and "the camele of Arabia hath tweye bonches on the bak."We have no other source of the origin of the word "hunch" to…