Cantering Through Cant (25)

If you are in a large crowd, it may be as well to find a Squire of Albatia. Such a worthy, according to Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), is “a weak, profligate spendthrift”. The Squire of the company is one who pays the whole reckoning or treats the company. Such generosity is known as standing squire and too much standing squire may result in a visit to a ten in the hundred, a userer. An interest rate of more than five in the hundred, Grose explains, being considered usurious interest.

Perhaps too long in the company of such reprobates will result in you wearing tears of the tankard, drippings of liquor on your waistcoat, and increase the chances of being a tenant at will, someone whose wife fetches him from the alehouse. It will also almost certainly result in the use of a tea voider, a chamber pot.

Physical characteristics rarely went unremarked upon. A squint-a-piper was a man or woman with a squint, who was said to “be born in the middle of the week, and looking both ways towards Sunday”. Alternatively, they were thought to have been born in a hackney coach, looking out of wither window at the same time. The attribute was ideal for a cook who was then able to have one eye on the pot and the other up the chimney. Another euphemism for a squint was to be “looking nine ways at once”.

Student discounts are nothing new. The practice of thirding was common in Grose’s time, where two-thirds of the original price is allowed by the upholsterers to the students for household goods returned to them within the year. I presume they had to have been returned in good condition.