Handy pandy,
Sugary candy,
Which will you have—
Top or bottom?
—London (A. B. Gomme).
IV.
Handy pandy, Jack a dandy,
Which hand will you have?
—Burne’s Shropshire Folk-lore, p. 530.
(b) The hands are closed, some small article is put in one of them behind the back of the player. The closed fists are then turned rapidly round one another while the rhyme is being said, and they are then placed one on top of the other. A guess is then made by any one of the players as to which hand the object is in. If correct, the guesser obtains the object; if incorrect, the player who performs “Handy dandy” keeps it.
(c) This game is mentioned in Piers Plowman, p. 69 of Wright’s edition. Douce quotes an ancient MS. which curiously mentions the game as “men play with little children at ‘handye-dandye,’ which hand will you have” (ii. 167). Johnson says: “‘Handy dandy,’ a play in which children change hands and places: ‘See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief! Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” (King Lear, iv. 6). Malone says, “‘Handy dandy’ is, I believe, a play among children, in which something is shaken between two hands, and then a guess is made in which hand it is retained.” See Florio’s Italian Dictionary, 1598: “Bazzicchiare, to shake between the hands; to play ‘Handy dandy.’” Pope, in his Memoirs of Cornelius Scriblerus, in forbidding certain sports to his son Martin till he is better informed of their antiquity, says: “Neither [cross and pile], nor [ducks and drakes], are quite so ancient as ‘Handy dandy,’ though Macrobius and St. Augustine take notice of the first, and Minutius Foelix describes the latter; but ‘Handy dandy’ is mentioned by Aristotle, Plato, and Aristophanes.” Browne, in Britannia’s Pastorals (i. 5), also alludes to the game.
See “[Neiveie-nick-nack].”
Hap the Beds
A singular game, gone through by hopping on one foot, and with that foot sliding a little flat stone out of an oblong bed, rudely drawn on a smooth piece of ground. This bed is divided into eight parts, the two of which at the farther end of it are called the Kail-pots. If the player then stands at one end, and pitches the smooth stone into all the divisions one after the other, following the same on a foot (at every throw), and bringing it out of the figure, this player wins not only the game, but is considered a first-rate daub at it; failing, however, to go through all the parts so, without missing either a throw or a hop, yet keeping before the other gamblers (for many play at one bed), still wins the curious rustic game.—Mactaggart’s Gallovidian Encyclopædia.