Someone at dinner the other day tried to convince us that the origin of the phrase sent to Coventry had something to do with a London livery company expelling members for some misdemeanour, forcing them to practise in Coventry, beyond the territorial limit of livery authority or (according to another version) a free-trade town that took no cognisance of guild controls.
I can’t say I was convinced by this explanation and I took an early opportunity to refer to a big fat dictionary. It offered little comfort. Indeed it suggested that readers might care to refer to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Now Brewer is a reference work best read in 19th-century editions for this reason: that at no period has it provided reliable origins for phrases, so it is better at least to learn what it was that they believed a century ago. It has historical value.
Brewer (in the 1898 edition) says: ‘According to Messrs Chambers (Cyclop’dia), the citizens of Coventry had at one time so great a dislike to soldiers that a woman seen speaking to one was instantly tabooed.
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