Piper

The Pied Piper. (See Pied.)

Who’s to pay the piper? (See Pay.)

Tom Piper. So the piper is called in the morris dance.

⁂ There is apparently another Tom Piper, referred to by Drayton and others, of whom nothing is now known. He seems to have been a sort of Mother Goose, or raconteur of short tales.

“Tom Piper is gone out, and mirth bewailes,

He never will come in to tell us tales.”

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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.