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
(_Bunbury Church Accounts._)
[67] So at Chester, the top of the river bank is called “The Cop,” and
a “cop-hedge” is, in Cheshire, a bank with a hedge on top of it.
A similar official at Tarvin was familiarly known as “The Cobber,” and
at Tarporley as “The Awakener.”[68]
[68] The following anecdote, which is vouched for, is too good to
omit:--At a certain Cheshire church, where the farmers slumbered
peacefully during the afternoon sermon, the incumbent was surprised
on a certain Sunday to see the farmers, one after another, waking up
suddenly and vigorously rubbing their faces. At last, looking up in a
gallery to the left of the pulpit, he saw a boy with a pea-shooter, and
at once discerned the cause of the commotion. He shook his fist at the
lad, but to no effect, and at last cried out, “Young man, desist!” but
the boy, bent on his work, replied, “Never thee mind! get along with
thy sermon; I’ll keep the beggars awaken for thee!”
Another curious game is “Dot.” Children move in a ring round one
representing “Dot,” and sing:--
“Dun yo’ wot, ’oo were Dot?
He were not a bad lot;
Whereabouts was his cot,
Oi’n furgotten to jot.”
(_North Cheshire and Malpas._)
At this point “Dot” puts his hand out, and the one touched has to take
his place. This is practically a “counting-out rhyme,” and there seems
every probability that it is a very ancient one.
The Manor of Edge, in the Hundred of Broxton, was held, according
to _Domesday Survey_, by Edwin, a Saxon thane, who, although he was
compelled to become tenant to Norman Robert FitzHugh, managed to
retain for himself the two Edges. Contemporary with him was Dot, the
Saxon lord of sixteen manors, some of them conjointly with Edwin; but,
more unlucky than he, Dot lost all his manors and fled to Wales. His
grandson, Cadwgan Dot, was father of Hova Dot or Dod, from whom the
Edge and Broxton Dods claim lineal descent.