Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
You've got me at "quintain", though I'd guess that it was some sort of landscaping area. Or a mutant 5-lobed plantain being served up for elevenses.
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Just so you do know, a quintain is a jousting game, which remained popular at village fairs in England really right up to the time that horses went out of fashion. The idea was to hit a small target with a lance, while riding at a full gallop. In the form of the game in "Barchester Towers", it's a pole with a rotating cross-bar at the top, on one end of which was a target, and on the other end a heavy bag of flour, so that if you missed the target, or struck it poorly, you got hit on the head by the bag of flour.
So now you know
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