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Pin Money

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A lady’s allowance of money for her own personal expenditure. Long after the invention of pins, in the fourteenth century, the maker was allowed to sell them in open shop only on January 1st and 2nd. It was then that the court ladies and city dames flocked to the depôts to buy them, having been first provided with money by their husbands. When pins became cheap and common, the ladies spent their allowances on other fancies, but the term pin money remained in vogue.

It is quite an error to suppose that pins were invented in the reign of François I., and introduced into England by Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII. In 1347, just 200 years before the death of François, 12,000 pins were delivered from the royal wardrobe for the use of the Princess Joan, and in 1400 (more than a century before François ascended the throne) the Duchess of Orleans purchased of Jehan le Breconnier, espinglier, of Paris, several thousand long and short pins, besides 500 de la façon dʹAngleterre. So that pins were not only manufactured in England, but were of high repute even in the reign of Henry IV. of England (1399–1413).

 

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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.

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Pillory
Pilot
Pilot Balloon (A)
Pilot Fish
Pilot that weathered the Storm (The)
Pilpay or Bidpay
Pimlico (London)
Pimlico
Pin (A)
Pin
Pin Money
Pinabello or Pinabel (in Orlando Furioso)
Pinchbeck
Pindar
Pindar and the Bees
Pindar of Wakefield (George-a-Green)
Pindaric Verse
Pinder
Pindorus (in Jerusalem Delivered)
Pine-bender (The)
Pink (A)