cliket (A.N.) [114], a kind of latch key. cliketten, [114], to fasten with a cliket. Tyrwhit explains the word simply as meaning a key—but in Piers Ploughman it is put so in immediate apposition with the word key, that it must have differed from it. In Chaucer, C. T. 9990, et seq. it appears to be the key of a garden gate:—
This freissche May, that I spake of so yore,
In warm wex hath emprynted the cliket
That January bar of the smale wiket,
By which into his gardyn ofte he went;
And Damyan, that knew al hir entent,
The cliket counterfeted prively.
In a document of the date 1416, quoted by Ducange, v. Cliquetus, it is ordered that, Refectorarius semper teneat hostium refectorii clausum cum cliqueto
clyngen (A.S.) [276], to shrink, wither, pine. Reliq. Antiquæ, vol. ii, p. 210:—
When eld me wol aweld, mi wele is awai;