Becket

At the same time, mind, I must have a bit of a frolic occasionally, for that's all the pleasure I has, when I gets a little chink in my becket; and ye know, too, that I don t care much for that stuff, for a dollar goes with me as fur as a gold ounce does with you, when ye put on your grand airs, and shower it about like a nabob.

The tool with which the cesses are dug is called a becket […] It is a wooden spade of a rectangular shape, quite flat, and shod with iron. An iron notch projecting at right angles to the plane of the blade cuts into the peat, and forms the side of the cess. The workman stands above and drives the becket almost vertically into the soft peat.

In the earlier time sods or hassocks were dug with a moorland spade, heart-shaped, but about 1856 a tool eighteen inches long and four inches wide, with an iron flange, called a becket was used […] The becket was first used in Isleham Fen and was of smaller dimensions than that used in Burwell Fen, being fourteen inches long and two and a half inches wide.

He marked four widths of the becket to the left, then thrusting and penetrating for fully 18 inches into the soggy peat, withdrawing and twisting the becket, completing the final thrusting on the back run.

Cornish choughs, or “beckets”, as they are sometimes known, are seen on Thomas Wolsey’s coat of arms; they are a reference to his namesake, Thomas Becket.