The sailors would get paid in advance of leaving the harbour, spend their money, and embark the ship with nothing. In his book Old England and New Zealand, author Alfred Simmons gives detailed explanation and background of the "Flogging the Dead Horse" ceremony, performed by a ship's crew at the end of the first month of their voyage at which time wages resumed. Many sailors were paid in advance for their first month's work. įoster apparently "played for" the dead horse by seeking payment for work without working, and regained his fortune by finding it.
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Sir Humphry Foster had lost the greatest part of his estate, and then, playing, as it is said, for a dead horse, did, by happy fortune, recover it again. In a 17th-century quote from a collection of documents owned by the late Earl of Oxford, Edward Harley, Paying for such hard work in advance meant the chances of a horse's work being done, rather than simply keeping the payment, could be represented by a dead horse (expecting work from a horse that you had already killed). Some scholars claim that the phrase originated in 17th-century slang, when a horse was a symbol of hard work. The earliest instance cited in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1872, when The Globe newspaper, reporting the Prime Minister, William Gladstone's, futile efforts to defend the Ecclesiastical Courts and Registries Bill in the Commons, observed that he "might be said to have rehearsed that particularly lively operation known as flogging a dead horse". Speaking in the House of Commons in March 1859 on Bright's efforts to promote parliamentary reform, Lord Elcho remarked that Bright had not been "satisfied with the results of his winter campaign" and that "a saying was attributed to him that he found he was 'flogging a dead horse'."
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The expression is said to have been popularized by the English politician and orator John Bright.