School slang

‘Roaster — A green linnet, as this bird was most frequently roasted by the boys at the playroom fire.’ That item comes in a glossary at the back of The History of Sedgley Park School by F.C. Husenbeth, published in 1856. I stumbled across it when looking to see if the book had an index. (It didn’t.)

Sedgley Park, founded in 1767 and transformed in 1870 into Cotton College, now defunct, was not, I suppose, worse than most schools. Indeed Husenbeth, there from 1803 to 1814, aged seven to 18, looked back on it with affection. As we remember from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, boys enjoyed an enviable freedom to trap birds, light fires and buy supplementary rations. It was a freedom rather like that in the Fleet Prison, and the glossary reads a little like prison slang, concentrating on food, punishment and trickery.

Food was regarded with close attention. Thus razor was a thin portion of bread, cork new bread, flat the part of the loaf that was smooth, and crack the part between upper and lower crusts. To cruize was to slip into the kitchen passage to get bread out of the bread-room. Porco was pork pie, hodgy hog’s pudding (a type of sausage containing pig offal and fat mixed with a cereal filler, such as oatmeal), smiler boiled beef. To lace was to eat with enjoyment and to beat in chastisement (the latter noted in the Oxford English Dictionary). Some other words listed are standard English, such as plum-duff and clag, ‘mud’, which the OED speculates is from a Norse word parallel to the English clay.

Cornobble was a boys’ punishment of making one of them pull a table the length of the playroom while being scourged with knotted handkerchiefs.