GAMES

Randle Holme gives an entertaining list of children’s games in the Stuart period, nearly all of which are now obsolete. He does not mention one which is more popular in Cheshire than the Southern Counties. This is the game in which a horse chestnut is threaded on a string and struck at with chestnuts similarly threaded. The chestnut is called a “coppity-co”:⁠—

“Coppity-co,

My first blow”

is the rhyme used. The word is now softened into cobbity-co (so in Shropshire) and even into comity-co (Chester, 1909).

“Cobbity-cuts

Put daïn your nuts.”

(South Cheshire.)

Cop is old English for top or head.[67] Somnolent church-goers in olden times had reason to remember this fact.

Paid Richard Pennington for whiping dogs and cobing sleeping folke£0100

(Bunbury Church Accounts.)

[67] So at Chester, the top of the river bank is called “The Cop,” and a “cop-hedge” is, in Cheshire, a bank with a hedge on top of it.

A similar official at Tarvin was familiarly known as “The Cobber,” and at Tarporley as “The Awakener.”[68]

[68] The following anecdote, which is vouched for, is too good to omit:⁠—At a certain Cheshire church, where the farmers slumbered peacefully during the afternoon sermon, the incumbent was surprised on a certain Sunday to see the farmers, one after another, waking up suddenly and vigorously rubbing their faces. At last, looking up in a gallery to the left of the pulpit, he saw a boy with a pea-shooter, and at once discerned the cause of the commotion. He shook his fist at the lad, but to no effect, and at last cried out, “Young man, desist!” but the boy, bent on his work, replied, “Never thee mind! get along with thy sermon; I’ll keep the beggars awaken for thee!”

Another curious game is “Dot.” Children move in a ring round one representing “Dot,” and sing:⁠—

“Dun yo’ wot, ’oo were Dot?

He were not a bad lot;

Whereabouts was his cot,

Oi’n furgotten to jot.”

(North Cheshire and Malpas.)

At this point “Dot” puts his hand out, and the one touched has to take his place. This is practically a “counting-out rhyme,” and there seems every probability that it is a very ancient one.

The Manor of Edge, in the Hundred of Broxton, was held, according to Domesday Survey, by Edwin, a Saxon thane, who, although he was compelled to become tenant to Norman Robert FitzHugh, managed to retain for himself the two Edges. Contemporary with him was Dot, the Saxon lord of sixteen manors, some of them conjointly with Edwin; but, more unlucky than he, Dot lost all his manors and fled to Wales. His grandson, Cadwgan Dot, was father of Hova Dot or Dod, from whom the Edge and Broxton Dods claim lineal descent.

The following are additional “counting-out” specimens:⁠—

Orcum, Borcum,

Boni, Corkum,

Ericum, Bericum, bo-ni-bus.

O.U.T. spells out.

(Chester.)

One, two,

Sky-blue;

All in

But you.

(Chester, 1904.)