150
NOTES AND QUERIES. 9* s. v. FEB. 2*. im
floor of the bay into portions resembling the
- ' squares" of a chess-board may have been
of real service in making calculations. To enable people to understand such a coin as the penny, which did not, like the shilling, represent the annual rent arising from an undivided corporeal thing,* it may have been necessary, in the first instance at any rate, to use actual demonstration, in order that the}' might see, with their very eyes, that the coin represented an aliquot part of the rent arising from an undivided share of real property.
Now the "squares" drawn on the floor of the bay, or on the substituted diagram or reckoning-board, might very well have been called panes, or, in Latin, abaci. Skeat says a penny is u a little pledge, a pawn," and he refers us to the word 'Pawn' in his dic- tionary. Under that word he refers to the French pan. a pane, and says that the English pane is a doublet of pawn. He might also nave referred to the mediaeval Latin pannus, a portion. The 'Prompt. Parv.' has " pane, or parte of a thynge," and Way, in a note on the word, says that, according to Forby, " in Norfolk a regular division of some sorts of husbandry work, as digging or sowing, is called a pane." The word penny, according to Kluge, may be derived from pan, a broad, shallow- vessel, or it may be associated with pawn, and a hypothetical base *pand.
If then the A.-S. penning & word which is common to the Teutonic languages is the name of one of the portions of an undivided bay of 240 square ft., or, as the case may have been, of 400 square it., we may reason- ably believe that it is compounded of a Teutonic prefix *penn, or *pann, and a termination -ing, as in shilling or farthing.
These divisions of the bay seem to be connected with the reckoning - board or calculating-table.
One of the commonest signs of an old English inn was " The Chequers." This sign, according to Larwood and Hotten's ' History of Signboards/ p. 488, is " perhaps the most patriarchal of all signs," and may be seen " even on houses in exhumed Pompeii." These authors quote an explanation of the sign given by Dr. Lardner :
" During the Middle Ages, it was usual for merchants, accountants, and judges, who arranged
- It may be remarked that solidus, the Latin
word for '"shilling," means "undivided," and is usually regarded as equivalent to "solidus nummus." The Gothic Nalfywo* in .John xiv. 2 means "bays," and is akin to O.H.G. selida (with open e), a dwell- ing, and possibly to A.-S. selde, as in sumorselde, a summer-house. The summer-house was a booth of one bay.
matters of revenue, to appear 011 a covered bane, so
called from an old Saxon word meaning a seat
(hence our bank). Before them was placed a flat
surface, divided by parallel white lines into per-
pendicular columns ; these again were divided
transversely by lines crossing the former, so as to
separate each column into squares. This table was
called an Exchequer, from its resemblance to a
chess-board, and the calculations were made by
counters placed on its several divisions (something
after the manner of the Roman abacus). A money-
changer's office was generally indicated by a sign of
the chequered board suspended. This sign after-
wards came to indicate an inn or house of entertain-
ment, probably from the circumstance of the
innkeeper also following the trade of money-
changer a coincidence still very common in seaport
towns." 'Arithmetic,' p. 44.
There is a nursery jingle, common every- where in England, but now in a corrupt state, which relates to counting up to twenty. Three or four years ago the Hev. Carus Collier sent me the following version from Bridlington in East Yorkshire :
One, two, come buckle my shoe ;
Three, four, knock him o er ;
Five, six, chop sticks ;
Seven, eight, a pennyweight ;
Nine, ten, a good fat hen ;
Eleven, twelve, dig and delve ;
Thirteen, fourteen, here we've brought him ;
Fifteen, sixteen, here we fix him ;
Seventeen, eighteen, here we hoist him ;
Nineteen, twenty, we've done him plenty.
The most usual version of the jingle begins :
One, two, come buckle my shoe ; Three, four, knock at the door ; Five, six, chop sticks ; Seven, eight, lay them straight.
In the ' Dialogus de Scaccario ' of the year 1178 the chequered table in the Court of Exchequer is thus described :
" Scaccarium tabula est quadrangula. Super- ponitur autem scaccario superiori pannus niger virgis distinctus, distantibus a se virgis vel pedis vel palmse extentse spacio. In spaciis autem calculi sunt."
In another passage the 'Dialogue' shows that in the twelfth century the origin of the Exchequer table was unknown. But these lines, which have probably been repeated in some form by every English child in every English village, tell us of pennyweights, of counting up to twenty, and of laying out the virgce or " sticks " by which, as it seems, the black cloth of the reckoning-table was divided into " squares " or " panes," and they seem to tell us of " fixing " the " sticks."
It will be seen that the lines refer, not to the twelve pence which make the shilling, but to the twenty pennyweights which make the ounce. According^, they may refer to the 20 portions of 20 square ft. each into
