Tippins

As a young girl, right around the time she was betrothed - at seven - to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, Matilda (or Maud) (or Maude) invented the game of Tippins, later employed on a wide scale and for unnumbered centuries by Royal subjects on the occasion of the monarch's birthday. Matilda's reign, though lasting only eight months in the year 1114, incited the ire of Britannia, who believed her haughty, too-foreign, and generally ill-tempered. The game of Tippins was taken up en masse explicitly to mock the Empress Matilda (even now, her name is often omitted from Britain's royal chronology), whose authorship of Tippins they ostensibly believed precious, and whose continued fancy for it they seemingly took as evidence of a delusional mind. The rules of the game itself are completely lost to history. We know only that it revolved around the acquisition of pieces of string beaded with small, wafer-heavy handmade objects (or tippins), and that its popular variant was almost never joined without accompanying volumes of English ale; alas, this no doubt contributes to the historical obliteration of the game's rules. There did endure, however, until very recently, a vocabulary of Tippins, involving such turns of phrase as seen in this gem from an anonymous, untitled tract found scribbled over the faded newsprint of a Piccadilly Picayune from 1842:

"Oy, Mary's all Tucked. It's thrice Tippins to you she's truced or I'm squabbled. "

Among the detritus found elsewhere in the written word's effluvial outpour scattered amongst 21st C.E. England, I have stumbled upon references to "the Tippins trapeze" and "triumph Tippins!" The former seeming to indicate the treacherous skirting of dire straits, the latter a rousing and final success.