Hand-in-cap

Hand-in-cap is an old English trading procedure, recorded as early as the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, that was used to fairly settle a swap of two items of uncertain or unequal value and gave the modern English word handicap its name. In the traditional form of the game, two people wishing to trade agreed on a neutral umpire, and each put forfeit money into a cap along with the items being offered. The umpire examined both items and announced an opinion on which side, if either, owed extra money to make the trade fair. All three parties then placed a hand into the cap and withdrew it at the same moment: an open hand signaled agreement with the umpire's valuation, a closed hand signaled disagreement. If both traders opened their hands, the trade went ahead on the umpire's terms; if both kept their hands closed, the deal was off; if the two disagreed with each other, the umpire kept the forfeit money as a fee for the failed negotiation. The same neutral-adjustment principle was later extended to horse racing in the mid-eighteenth century, where a handicapper assigned different weights to horses to even out a race, and by the early twentieth century the word handicap had drifted further to describe a disadvantage a person carries, the sense that survives today.