The word "jack" as a common noun and in compound words has been held to be a general term applied to any contrivance which does the work of a boy or servant, or a simple appliance which is subjected to common usage. In French the name Jacques was a term for a young man of menial condition. The term "country jake" is of kindred sense. Jack lord, jack meddler, jackanapes, Jack Tar, smoke-jack, jack-o'-lantern, black-jack, jack-rabbit, the term jack applied to the knave in playing cards, and the expressions jack-at-a-pinch, jack in office, jack in bedlam, jack in a box, jack of all trades, and many others show the derivative meaning. Hence jack-knife may mean a boy's knife. In English dialect the word was jack-lag-knife, also jack-a-legs, in Scotch, jock-te-leg—these by a somewhat fanciful derivation said to be from Jacques de Liege, the celebrated cutler.
Old Jack-knives
A good jack-knife was the most highly desired possession of a boy. Days of weary work and hours of persistent pleading were gone through with in hundreds of cases before the prize was secured. Barlow knives had a century of popularity. Some now in Deerfield Memorial Hall are here shown. Note the curved end, a shape now obsolete, but in truth an excellent one for safe pocket carriage. Knives of similar shape have been found that are known to be a century and a half old. I have never seen in America any of the old knives used as lovers' tokens, with mottoes engraved on them, referred to by Shakespeare. The boy's stock of toys was largely supplied by his own jack-knife: elder pop-guns, chestnut and willow whistles, windmills, water-wheels, box-traps, figure 4 traps. Toy weapons have varied little from the Christian era till to-day. Clubs, slings, bows and arrows, air-guns, are as old as the year One. Ere these were used as toys, they had been formidable weapons. They were weapons still, for some years of colonial life. In 1645 the court of Massachusetts ordered that all boys from ten to sixteen years old should be exercised with bows and arrows.
Bangwell Putt
Skating is an ancient pastime. As early as the thirteenth century Fitzstephen tells of young Londoners fastening the leg-bones of animals to the soles of the feet, and then pushing themselves on the ice by means of poles shod with sharp iron points.
Pepys thought skating "a very pretty art" when he saw it in 1662, but it was then a novelty to him, and he was characteristically a little afraid of it; justly disturbed, too, that the Duke of York would go "though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates which I did not like—but he slides very well."