penny-prick

1) No definition available

A game, the nature of which is uncertain, although it is recorded in the early fifteenth century in Essex and subsequently over a wide area. Hunter said of it in his Hallamshire Glossary that it consisted ‘of casting oblong pieces of iron at a mark’. A much earlier Sheffield reference refers to a similar practice and the circumstances in which a young man was injured: 1753 several youths was tumbling in a ... garding and using ... a piece of iron call’d a file, us’d at a game call’d Penyprick ... [William Fox] was passing betwixt the fall of the file and the young man’s inadvertanly casting of it.

places Sheffield
dates 1753

Related Content Loading...

Photo by Kreuzschnabel CC BY-SA 3.0