Knox and the naughty seat
QUESTION Did Scotland have a 16th-century tax called ‘buttock mail’?
From the late 16th century, behaviour considered deviant, particularly of an adulterous nature, by the Scottish Presbyterian Church meant the offender was forced to sit on a ‘stool of repentance’ in the kirk during Sunday services.
You could buy your way out of this punishment or commute the length of the sentence by paying ‘buttock mail’ — a fine rather than a tax.
Buttock was the slang term used for a prostitute, and mail was an old term for a sum of money.
The stool of repentance, known colloquially as the black stool, the creepie or the cutty stool, was small, wooden and three-legged with a round top.
It was placed aside from the rest of the congregation, who would watch on in derision as the minister publicly rebuked and shamed the perpetrator.
Such puritanical discipline had been abandoned by the Catholic Church, but it was one aspect of that religion enthusiastically embraced by John Knox and Andrew melville, the founding fathers of Scottish Presbyterianism.
The most common cases heard at the Kirk Sessions involved fornication or adultery. If caught, the offender might have to stand at the church door dressed only in sackcloth, barefoot and bareheaded, as the congregation filed past.
They would then have to sit on the stool during the service, sometimes for several weeks, until the minister felt their penance had been served.
The term buttock mail is akin to blackmail, the tribute or fine paid by English and Scottish border dwellers to reivers, or raiders, in return for immunity from harassment.
Scotland’s national poet robert Burns (1795-1796) was famous for his social commentary and his puncturing of the hypocrisy of Church and society. He achieved this brilliantly in his ribald and defiant poem The Fornicator, where he describes how, even as he is paying the buttock mail in front of the congregation his eyes are leading his thoughts . . . Before the congregation wide I pass’d the muster fairly, My handsome Betsy by my side, We gat our ditty rarely. My downcast eye, by chance did spy What made my mouth to water, Those limbs so clean, where I between, Commenced a fornicator. Wi’ ruefu’ face, and signs o’ grace, I paid the buttock hire; The night was dark, and thro’ the park, I couldna but convoy her. A parting kiss, what could I less; My vows began to scatter, Sweet Betsy fell, fal, lal, de ral, And I’m a fornicator. Malcolm Murray, Stirling.
QUESTION Why do most zips have YKK printed on them?
YKK is the trademark of the largest zip fastener manufacturer in the world, Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki gaisha, or Yoshida manufacturing Corporation.
As well as zips, it makes other types of fasteners, architectural products, plastic hardware and industrial machinery. It has 109 companies in 71 countries.
The company was founded in 1934 as San- es Shokai, changing its name in 1938. The YKK trademark was registered in January 1946. The first fastener that might be regarded as a zipper was patented in 1851 by Elias Howe, an American inventor and pioneer of the sewing machine, who called it an ‘ automatic, continuous clothing closure’.
In 1893, Whitcomb Judson, another American, marketed a ‘clasp locker’, which was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair, but it was not a commercial success.
The name zipper, or zip fastener in the UK, comes from the B. F. Goodrich company, which sold boots with a zip from 1923 onwards.
The innovation that has ensured YKK dominates the world of zip fasteners is that it makes them out of plastic, which is cheaper than the traditional metal.
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
QUESTION Why is Cyclopean architecture so called?
THIS type of architecture uses massive limestone boulders roughly fitted together without mortar. The blocks are so big that the ancient people of Greece thought only a one-eyed giant, a cyclops, could have been the builder, hence the term Cyclopean.
The mycenaean citadel at Tiryns, five miles north of the Peloponnesian seaport of Nafplio, is one of the finest such archaeological sites in Greece.
The mycenaean civilisation was the last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, spanning the period from 1600 BC to 1100 BC.
The most prominent site was mycenae in the Peloponnese, but the civilisation spread to the cities of Pylos, Tiryns, midea, orchomenos, Thebes, Athens in central Greece and Iolcos in Thessaly.
The building of Tiryns features in the legend of Perseus, which describes how the fortifications were built at the behest of Proetos, King of Argos, who had giants brought from Lycia in Asia minor to put the massive blocks in place.
Pindar (522 BC to 443 BC), an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, was the first to use the term Cyclopean to describe this architecture. In the Iliad, Homer simply calls the city ‘well-walled’.
Marcus Dearborn, Godalming, Surrey.
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