Mr. Editor,—In reading your account of the “Boar’s Head Carol,” in your Every-Day Book, vol. i. p. 1619, I find the old carol, but not the words of the carol as sung at present in Queen’s College, Oxford, on Christmas-day. As I think it possible you may never have seen them, I now send you a copy as they were sung, or, more properly, chanted, in the hall of Queen’s, on Christmas-day, 1810, at which time I was a member of the college, and assisted at the chant.
A boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary;
And I pray you, my masters, be merry,
Quot estis in convivio.—
Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino.
The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all this land;
And when bedeck’d with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.—
Caput apri, &c.
Our steward hath provided this,
In honour of the King of bliss:
Which on this day to be served is
In reginensi atrio.—
Caput apri, &c.
I am, &c.
A Quondam Queensman.
Beating the Lapstone.
For the Table Book.
There is a custom of “beating the lapstone,” the day after Christmas, at Nettleton, near Burton. The shoemakers beat the lapstone at the houses of all water-drinkers, in consequence of a neighbour, Thomas Stickler, who had not tasted malt liquor for twenty years, having been made tipsy by drinking only a half pint of ale at his shoemaker’s, at Christmas. When he got home, he tottered into his house, and his good dame said, “John, where have you been?—why, you are in liquor?”—“No, I am not,” hiccuped John, “I’ve only fell over the lapstone, and that has beaten my leg, so as I can’t walk quite right.” Hence the annual practical joke—“beating the lapstone.”
P.