Mr. H. B. Wheatley in “Round about Piccadilly” gives a full account of the later fortunes of Piccadilly. “The house commonly called Pickadilly House” was assigned as soldiers’ quarters on 1 August 1650 (“Interregnum Order-Book”). Faithorne’s map (1658) shows it as “The Gaming House.” Evelyn mentions the locality in his “Diary” (1662) saying that “orders had been given to pave the way from St. James’s North, which was a Quagmire, and the Haymarket, and Piquadillo.” Colonel Thomas Panton seems to have purchased it in 1671, and petitioned for leave to build on it, which was granted.
All this throws very little light on the derivation of the name, except that it dissociates it from “the gallants of the gaming house,” which was not built until Piccadilloes were out of fashion. Among the annals of 1612 we find mention of “yellow starch, and great cut-work bands and piccadillies (things that hath since lost the name),” said to have been imported or contrived by the notorious Mrs. Turner (Kennet’s “England,” ii, 638). Barnabe Rich in his “Honesty of the Age,” 1614, satirizing the tailors and “body-makers,” says, “he that some forty or fifty years sithens should have asked after a Pickadilly, I wonder who, could have understood him, or could have told what a Pickadilly had been, either fish or flesh.” Ben Jonson, in undated lines in “Underwoods,” says:
And then leap mad on a neat Pickardill.
In 1615 the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge promulgated an injunction against excess in apparel and the use of “strange peccadillies”; and in that same year, “4th November, 1615, Mrs. Anne Turner, who was executed at Tyburne, for poysoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, Knight, was buried at St. Martin’s,” and the churchwardens received 17s. 8d. for her grave. An effort to discredit her invention was made by “hanging her in yellow ruffles,” and the piccadillies shortly went out of fashion too.
Butler in his “Hudibras” styles the collars of the pillory “Peccadilloes.” Cotgrave, 1611; Minsheu, 1627; Nares’s “Old Glossary,” Blunt’s “Glossographia,” 1656, explain the word as a stiff collar or hem round a garment.
Seeing that Robert Baker was originally a tailor, it is quite possible that his aristocratic neighbours threw scorn on his ambitious house by nicknaming it after his collars “Pickadilly Hall,” a possibility supported by Garrard’s letter. But there is another possibility which I may suggest. Seeing that it was in the immediate neighbourhood of “Swanne Close,” held by the Earl of Salisbury, and seeing that the district was marshy, full of ditches, and pools formed in old gravel pits, it is just possible that a breed of plebeian ducks throve there. Down to the present time children in East Essex, calling these to their meals, cry,
Dilly Dilly, cuddilly, cuddilly, cuddilly,
Cud, Cud, Cud, Pick a dilly, dilly, dilly,
which words are probably a survival of the old original of the mocking parody “Dilly Dilly, come and be killed.” It is also possible that some specimens of dill, or of daffodils, frequently called dillies, grew there abundantly. The churchwardens’ clerk of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, in early years, carefully dissociated the parts of the word as “Pick a dilly.” It remains at least a fact for us that the word as a place name first enters literature associated neither with collars, tailors, nor gaming-houses, but with the botanist John Gerard, who found the blue buglosse “growing in a dry Ditch at Pickadilla” some time before 1633.
“Athenæum,” July 27th, 1901.