Hacker News Reader

Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

One thing I wasn't sure of after reading the article, are the objects then given back to the city after the ceremony or do they need to provide more objects the next year.

The former seems implied from the age of the items, but that doesn't seem like rent to me.

View on HN

From a page linked within the original article:

> The six horseshoes and the sixty-one nails themselves probably date from the 1360's. After being rendered to the Queen's Remembrancer, they are preserved in his Office and, with the permission of the Crown, they are loaned to the City Corporation to be rendered again the following year.

(http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/education-learning/s...)

If there's one thing you'd expect the city of London to excel at, it's finding a loophole that lets them pay a debt to the crown using property the crown loans them. If they're really doing it right, they probably get to bill the crown for holding the goods for them.

They are indeed returned after the ceremony. I suppose it helps keep the tradition without the tedium of trying to source another six oversized horseshoes every year. And the building of a pointless stock of blunt agricultural tools somewhere in Buckingham Palace too, I guess.

I was wondering about it as I read, too. I pictured a long hallway lined with 800-odd sets of items, maybe with a plaque here and there to provide context of what was happening in the country at that time.

Ah, only the Brits to turn a rental agreement into a photo op for tourists :)

Part of the ceremony should be sending some robbers in the night to steal them back, and if the guards catch them then have a public "flogging". Turtles all the way down you see.

That's what it sounds like to me too. Like the objects are brought out for the ceremony of "paying rent", but ownership of the items doesn't really change hands.

It'd be pretty interesting, though, to see & analyze history through an 800 year stretch of commodity products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com