ABSTRACT
I read this poem to the children. I told them that ‘cutpurse’ means ‘thief ’, ‘ill’ here means ‘wicked’, not ‘sick’, that an ‘ostler’ groomed horses, and that a ‘usurer’ lent money at great interest. They needed no other help with the meanings. I told them about the alphabets I see in other schools, and asked them to make suggestions for one to go round the room. It mustn’t, I said, be boring; so it mustn’t, to say the least, start with ‘A is for Apple’.
