When not for malice and contentious crymes, But all for prayse, and proofe of manly might, The martiall brood accustomed to fight: Then honour was the meed of victory, And yet the vanquished had no despight: Let later age that noble vse enuy, Vyle rancor to avoid, and cruel surquedry.

— Spenser, The Faerie Queene I.i (1590)

The stanza is doing the same work as the etymology: it stages the moment when battle stops meaning stour and starts meaning stoush. Spenser’s “antique tymes” have fighting without malice — pure contest, no residue. But the thing he’s elegizing is already gone, and what’s arrived in its place is “contentious crymes” and “vyle rancor” — fighting that has shed the ritual weight and kept only the noise. The semantic path from stour to stooshie to stoush is exactly this: the word travels from battle-as-order to tumult-as-disorder, and what gets lost at each crossing is the honour, not the violence.