1798. “Christ’s Hospital Three Quarters of a Century Ago” [Chelmsford Chronicle (1875), Ap. 16]. Beer we had certainly served out in wooden vessels of an extraordinary shape, called PIGGINS; about six of them for four boys to drink out of, but such beer! The PIGGINS were seldom replenished, for we could not drink it.
Pig-market (The), subs. (Oxford).—A corridor leading to the Divinity School: properly the Proscholium. [Said to have been so used in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.]
1837. Ingram, Memorials of Oxford.... The schools built by Abbot Hokenorton being inadequate to the increasing wants of the University, they applied to the Abbot of Reading for stone to rebuild them; and in the year 1532 it appears that considerable sums of money were expended on them; but they went to decay in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. and during the whole reign of Edward VI. The change of religion having occasioned a suspension of the usual exercises and scholastic acts in the University, in the year 1540 only two of these schools were used by determiners, and within two years after none at all. The whole area between these schools and the divinity school was subsequently converted into a garden and PIG-MARKET; and the schools themselves, being completely abandoned by the masters and scholars, were used by glovers and laundresses.
1853. Bradley, Verdant Green, iv. Our hero proceeded with his father along the High Street, and turned round by St. Mary’s, and so up Cat Street to the Schools, where they made their way to the classic PIG-MARKET, to wait the arrival of the Vice-Chancellor.
Pill, verb (University).—To talk twaddle or platitudes.
Pin, verb (Stonyhurst: obsolete).—To enjoy: e.g. “I PINNED my innings”; “this is a PINNING book.”
1887. Stonyhurst Mag., iii. 89. A downright enjoyable PINNABLE game.
To pin a lozen, verb. phr. (Royal High School, Edin.: obsolete).—To break a window. [Lozen = a pane of glass.]
Pinch. To pinch in, verb. phr. (Harrow).—See quot.
1867. Collins, The Public Schools, p. 315. Dr. Butler ... abolished, amongst other old customs, certain rites and ceremonies which were used in celebrating a boy’s remove from one form to the other in the lower part of the school. No such promotion was considered complete, so far as the boys were concerned, until the new member had been duly “PINCHED IN”—remaining a certain fixed time in the play-room, during which all the fraternity exercised a right of pinching him, limited only by the tenderness of their dispositions or the strength of their fingers. There were generally some adepts in this torture, who knew, and taught others, the tenderest places and the most artistic mode of taking hold, and who carried this evil knowledge with them from form to form, to be practised on a succession of victims. The rites of initiation were completed by tossing in a blanket in the dormitory, and a certain number of bumps against the ceiling were required to make the ceremony valid.