Old Penglaze and the tinker’s shop

A correspondent sent Hone two indoor games of the Cornish country people, which Davies Gilbert had listed with the carols as dying out, though the writer said the carol parties still went from house to house in the western parishes. In the tinker’s shop the players knelt round a pot of soot and water, hammering with sticks, and anyone who missed his name when the master called it was daubed with the sooty mop. In the corn market each player took a price for his name, and whoever blundered was sealed by Old Penglaze, a blackened figure on a hobby horse made of part of a horse’s hide, who shoed the culprit’s bare foot with blows. The game ended with a set dance.