Words - skip - Brewer’s

Birchin Lane

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I must send you to Birchin Lane, i.e. whip you. The play is on birch (a rod).

A suit in Birchin Lane. Birchin Lane was once famous for all sorts of apparel; references to second-hand clothes in Birchin Lane are common enough in Elizabethan books.

“Passing through Birchin Lane amidst a camproyal of hose and doublets, I took … occasion to slip into a captain’s suit—a valiant buff doublet stuffed with points and a pair of velvet slops scored thick with lace.”—Middleton: Black Book (1604).

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.