GEEY LAG GOOSE. 11 



and Newgate, where they are sold on commission. No 

 less than from seventy to eighty tons weight have been 

 sent, during the Christmas week, by rail to London 

 and other places, the geese averaging m weight from 

 nine to sixteen pounds, but some as much as twenty- 

 two pounds. The feathers obtained from twelve 

 thousand birds amounts in round numbers to four 

 thousand pounds, the quills and waste feathers being 

 kept separately and sold by themselves. It is evident, 

 therefore, from these figures that a most important 

 business in this line is carried on between Norvdch 

 and London,"^ the extent of which few persons have 

 any conception of. It should be stated, however, that 

 although the great demand for geese in the metropolis 

 takes place at Christmas time, the goose is in Norfolk 

 always most in request at Michaelmas, when it is, 

 according to the old local phrase, " a stubble goose, f" 



* Dr. Wynter, in his " Curiosities of Civilization," amongst the 

 statistics of "The London Commissariat," states that "the bulk of 

 the geese, ducks, and tui'keys come from Norfolk, Cambridge, and 

 Suffolk," the Eastern Counties Eailway alone having brought thence, 

 in 1853, " twenty-two thousand four hundred and sixty-two tons of 

 fish, fowl, and good red hei'rings ; " an amount which has, I believe, 

 been considerably exceeded since that time. 



f " The derivation of the term ' way-goose' is from the old 

 English word ioayz, stubble. Bailey informs us that wayz-goose, 

 or stubble-goose, is an entertainment given to journeymen at the 

 beginning of winter. Hence a wayz-goose was the head dish at 

 the annual feast of the printers, and is not altogether unknown as 

 a dainty dish in these days. Moxon, in his ' Mechanick Exercise' 

 (1683), tells us that ' it is customary for the journeymen to make 

 every year new paper windows, whether the old ones will serve 

 again or not ; because the day they make them, the master-printer 

 gives them a ^vay-goose. * * * These way-gooses are always 

 kept up about Bartholomew-tide ; and till the master-printer has 

 given their way-goose, the journeymen did not use to work by 

 candle-hght.' The same custom was formerly common at Coventry, 

 where it was usual in the large manufactories of ribbons and 

 c 2 



