Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/182

 by a smart stroke with the palm of the hand. Sometimes a groat-piece was used, and in the present times a halfpenny; and the game of shove-halfpenny is mentioned in the Times of April 25, 1845, as then played by the lower orders. Taylor, the water-poet, states that in his time, the beginning of the seventeenth century, "Edward (VI.) shillings" were chiefly used at shove-board. Venter-pointwas a children's game of the sixteenth century, named but nowhere described. Cross and pile is the old name of what is now called "tossing," or "heads and tails," the coin now used being generally a halfpenny, of which the obverse or bust of the Queen is the "head," and the reverse, whether the figure of Britannia or the harp of the Irish halfpenny, or other device, is called the tail. The origin of the term "cross and pile" is not very clear. The cross, in form that of St George, its four arms of equal length, was the favourite form for the reverse of silver coins from the time of Henry III., and perhaps at one time facilitated the fourthing or farthing of the coin, i.e., the dividing it into four equal quarters. But what was the pile? Not the pellets, for they were always inserted in the angles between the arms of the cross. Not the legend or reading on the coin, for that was found both on obverse and reverse. It does not appear to be from the Latin pilus (the beard), or pilum (an arrow or spear). Yet it was clearly the opposite side of the coin to the cross side. Grafton records, that in 1249 an order was made to coin a silver groat, which was to have on one side the picture of the King's face (Henry III.), and on the other a cross extended to the edge. In 1364, the controller of the King's Exchequer, by order of the King's treasurer, sent to the treasurer for Ireland twenty-four stamps for coining money there, viz., "three piles with six crosses, for pennies; the same for