‘Pop goes the weasel!’ my husband exclaimed, expertly muddying the waters. We had just been listening to another news bulletin that referred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer being expected to ‘break her pledge’ in the Budget.
It seemed to me that the ink on pledges were scarcely dry before they became aspirations that came to nothing. We are told that not raising income tax was ‘a key manifesto pledge’.
Why don’t we imitate the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of our forebears and resort to frithborh or frank-pledge? It was a system making each householder of a tithing (ten households) responsible for the other nine. This fits in with the root meaning of pledge – a hostage held as security for the fulfilment of a promise. A hostage is still taken and held at Buckingham Palace during the state opening of parliament to ensure safe return of the King and Queen. Last year it was Samantha Dixon MP.
We could hold members of the government hostage to ensure fulfilment of their manifesto pledges. Pledges are meant to be binding. In origin the word is related to plight, as in plighting one’s troth – one’s truth or true word – in the marriage service. That act of plighting was spoken in English even when most of the ceremony was in Latin. In the Sarum use of the liturgy, in centuries before the Book of Common Prayer was invented, the bride and groom would ‘plight the my treuthe’, ‘tyl deth us departe’.
A negotiable kind of pledge is an item pawned or popped against the repayment of a sum of money. ‘He’ll make us pop our Unders for the Reckoning,’ says someone in Fielding, who knew about low life. Unders are underclothes. This is where my husband came in with his nursery rhyme. The weasel is said by some to be a tailor’s iron, which could be popped to buy twopenny rice or a drink at the Eagle. If ministers forfeited their valuables for broken pledges they might take them seriously.
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