GAMES
Randle Holme gives an entertaining list of children’s games in the Stuart period, nearly all of which are now obsolete. He does not mention one which is more popular in Cheshire than the Southern Counties. This is the game in which a horse chestnut is threaded on a string and struck at with chestnuts similarly threaded. The chestnut is called a “coppity-co”:—
“Coppity-co,
My first blow”
is the rhyme used. The word is now softened into cobbity-co (so in Shropshire) and even into comity-co (Chester, 1909).
“Cobbity-cuts
Put daïn your nuts.”
(South Cheshire.)
Cop is old English for top or head.[67] Somnolent church-goers in olden times had reason to remember this fact.
| Paid Richard Pennington for whiping dogs and cobing sleeping folke | £0 | 10 | 0 |