betake

verb

1. (obsolete, transitive)To take over to; take across (to); deliver.
2. (obsolete, transitive)To seize; lay hold of; take.

   “a rain-cloud [...] had betaken a dusky brown color, and about its lower verge a fringe of fine straight lines of rain was suggested [...].”

3. (literary, reflexive)To take oneself to; go or move; repair; resort; have recourse.

   “One morning as I lay in my bed, a ſtrong motion vvas ſuddenly glanced into my thoughts of going to London; I aroſe and betook me to the vvay, […]”

   “The rest, in imitation, to like arms / Betook them.”

   “On the slightest loss they betook themselves to treaty and submission; upon the least appearance in their favour they were as ready to resume their arms, without any regard to their former engagements;—a conduct, which demonstrates, that our British ancestors had no regular polity with a standing coercive power.”

   “This knave, […] shoes horses better than e'er a man betwixt us and Iceland; and so he gives up his practice on the bipeds, the two-legged and unfledged species, called mankind, and betakes him entirely to shoeing of horses.”

   “[…] the shepherds of Desvres were seen at a distance betaking themselves to the insufficient shelter of the turfen hovels dotted upon the cote to afford them a retreat from the vicissitudes of the atmosphere.”

4. (archaic, reflexive)To commit to a specified action.
5. (archaic, transitive)To commend or entrust to; to commit to.
6. (archaic, intransitive, often, poetic)To take oneself.

   “Then do no further goe, no further stray, / But here lie downe, and to thy rest betake, / Th'ill to preuent, that life ensewen may. / For what hath life, that may it loued make, / And giues not rather cause it to forsake?”

7. (transitive)To beteach.