This sport, which is sometimes called “Shuggy-shew” in the North of England, is described as follows by Gay:—
“On two near elms the slackened cord I hung,
Now high, now low, my Blouzalinda swung.”
So Rogers, in the Pleasures of Memory, l. 77:—
“Soar’d in the swing, half pleas’d and half afraid,
Through sister elms that wav’d their summer shade.”
Speght, in his Glossary, says, “‘Meritot,’ a sport used by children by swinging themselves in bell-ropes, or such like, till they are giddy.” In Mercurialis de Arte Gymnastica, p. 216, there is an engraving of this exercise.
Halliwell quotes from a MS. Yorkshire Glossary, as follows:—“‘Merrytrotter,’ a rope fastened at each end to a beam or branch of a tree, making a curve at the bottom near the floor or ground in which a child can sit, and holding fast by each side of the rope, is swung backwards and forwards.”
Baker (Northamptonshire Glossary) calls “Merrytotter” the game of “[See-saw],” and notes that the antiquity of the game is shown by its insertion in Pynson, “Myry totir, child’s game, oscillum.”
Chaucer probably alludes to it in the following lines of the Miller’s Tale—
“What eileth you? some gay girle (God it wote)
Hath brought you thus on the merry tote.”