In the ‘Nick’ of Time

By Robert Kellert

Let’s rewind back to Medieval England, before the 16^th century. Each meal featured pudding—the English fancy their pudding to this day, although one suspects it wasn’t so tasty back then—and this was the first food served. Hence, to arrive just in time for your meal was to arrive at ‘pudding time’. In the words of famed playwright and poet John Heywood, also known for his unique collection of English proverbs, it was ‘puddygn time’.

But this expression was too ambiguous for some. After all, as good as pudding was, it just couldn’t apply to everything; and in the 16^th century, ‘pudding’ began to mean what we now consider dessert—basically, anything sweet served at the end, not the beginning, of a meal. So some English chums sought a more accurate and particular expression than ‘pudding time’.

Well now, we’re talking about an age without clocks, calculators, and Excel spreadsheets, so the English looked to ‘tally’ sticks. The English did not invent ‘tally’ sticks: prehistoric peoples are believed to have used them as far back as 37,000 years ago; Herodotus suggests the Persians used them; Pliny the Elder refers to similar recording devices; Marco Polo records encountering the Chinese using them; and the Incas relied on them, as well.

The English used ‘tally’ sticks to measure things or keep a score of some sort. They were especially useful in schools, where attendance was, like today, recorded. When a student arrived, the instructor would make a notch in the stick; when that student was absent, no such notch was made, and the student was in a ‘spot of bother’, as our English friends across the pond oft utter. Thus, to arrive on time was to arrive ‘in the nick of time’, and the expression is still with us today.

As an endnote, it turns out that ‘tally’ sticks also gave birth to stockholding. Medieval Europeans were, for the most part, poor (i.e., without money to use in transactions, a reason for the proliferation of usury at the time) and illiterate. This made deal-brokering an enormous challenge, to say the least.  One day, however, someone had an idea.

Take a square piece of Hazelwood, make notches representing numbers (which are critical in business transactions), and then split the piece lengthwise. Then give a half to one party, and the other half to the other party. Each party will then have proof of the transaction. Over time, this practice was modified by making one half of the stick longer than the other. This way, the longer half would belong to someone who gave someone else money—this person was known as a ‘stockholder’, a term we still use today—and the one who received the money would keep the shorter half. This practice helped settle earlier disputes, for now there was physical proof of a transaction.

That’s it for now. ‘Tis time to part. And just in the nick of time, too.