Trim that hedge!

I don't know about you, but on Mondays I rarely get any post - sure, the postman comes, but what he puts through the letterbox is invariably rubbish - unsolicited mail and flyers,  Last Monday it included an invitation to invest in a hedge fund.  No thank you, but it did cause me to think - where does the expression "hedge fund" come from?  And of course it didn't take long to realise that it came from that other expression "to hedge your bets" - that is to make other bets so that, if your main bet fails, you don't lose everything.  But of course, this simply raised the question - where did that expression come from? Well, it seems that "hedge" as a verb has been around for at least 600 years in the sense of  "to limit" - which of course is exactly what a hedge does - it limits an area of land.  Its use in the sense of limiting your financial liability can be traced back to the 1600s.