Children Stories - Boy's Bailiff

One day at a busy airport, the passengers on a commercial airliner are seated, waiting for the cockpit crew to show up so they can get under way. The pilot and copilot finally appear in the rear of the plane, and begin walking up to the cockpit t... Read more of Blind pilots at Free Jokes.ca

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Boy's Bailiff

from Popular Rhymes And Nursery Tales - CUSTOM RHYMES

An old custom, formerly in vogue at Wenlock, in Shropshire, thus
described by Mr. Collins: "I am old enough to remember an old custom,
and the last time it took place was about sixty years ago; it was called
the 'boy's bailiff,' and was held in the Easter week, Holy Thursday, or
in Whitsun week, and I have no doubt was for the purpose of going a
bannering the extensive boundaries of this franchise, which consists of
eighteen parishes. It consisted of a man, who wore a hair-cloth gown,
and was called the bailiff, a recorder, justices, town-clerk, sheriff,
treasurer, crier, and other municipal officers. They were a large
retinue of men and boys mounted on horseback, begirt with wooden swords,
which they carried on their right sides, so that they must draw the
swords out of the scabbards with their left hands. They, when I knew
them, did not go the boundary, but used to call at all the gentlemen's
houses in the franchise, where they were regaled with meat, drink, and
money; and before the conclusion they assembled at the pillory, at the
guildhall, where the town-clerk read some sort of rigmarole which they
called their charter, and I remember one part was--

We go from Bickbury and Badger to Stoke on the Clee,
To Monkhopton, Round Acton, and so return we.

Bickbury, Badger, and Stoke on the Clee, were and are the two extreme
points of the franchise, north and south; Monkhopton and Round Acton are
two other parishes on the return from Stoke St. Millborough, otherwise
Stoke on the Clee (or perhaps Milburga, the tutelar saint of the Abbey
of Wenlock), to Much Wenlock. This custom I conceive to have originated
in going a bannering, unless it should have been got up as a mockery to
the magistracy of the franchise; but I rather think the former."

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