TRENCHER CAPS, EXETER, 1841.

 From the Western Times, March 13th, 1841:

"Every body in this city has seen the Diocesan school boys parade the streets in their trencher caps.   Bishop Phillpotts enforces this daily airing in the open streets by way of advertising the existence of the school.

"Some of the lads look lank and hungry,  We hope their trenchers are filled at home as well as their trencher caps are out. 

"But we neither publish, hint, nor insinuate aught that would imply a doubt of the fact."

*

The Western Times liked a pun as much as it disliked Bishop Phillpotts.  The insinuation is, however much we are assured that there is none, that the twenty-six or so schoolboy/choristers of the cathedral's school were being half starved by a penny pinching Bishop, Dean and Chapter.

A trencher cap is nowadays more usually called a mortar-board.    Both appellations attempt to be pleasant.  It is called a trencher cap, say some, because, upside down, it looks like a trencher coming to table with a bowl upon it but certainly it is so called because the flat hats look like trenchers (wooden plates or platters) at the dining table.  Hence the Times' somewhat heavy pun.   

I wonder whether these caps were worn by schoolboys elsewhere.   

The lank and hungry boys must have looked cute in their 'academic dress' as they passed through the streets of Exeter, just as do the somewhat plumper graduates of the Open University these days.