Orders, Master, orders

Around St Nicholas’s Day, the schoolboys’ patron, northern grammar school boys shut their master out and chanted for their orders before letting him back in. The orders were the holidays he had to promise for the coming year. An old schoolmaster recited to Denham one stanza of the barring-out rhyme used at a Yorkshire school some sixty years earlier. Denham believed the whole year’s holidays had once been strung together in verses just as rough.