Spur money

Anyone who walked into a cathedral choir wearing spurs could be made to pay a small fine, called spur money, to the choristers. Dekker joked about gallants in St Paul’s whose jingling spurs set the boys swarming round them, and John Ray had to pay it at Peterborough in 1661. A wearer could escape by challenging the youngest chorister to repeat his gamut, and paid nothing if the boy failed. Within Chambers’s own time the choristers of Hereford kept a visitor’s hat until he paid, and the magistrates upheld them.