rigmarole

Ugh, those friggin’ regulations. Whatever you do, it’s not enough. It’s like some kind of deranged quadrille or cotillion – every step you take, there’s another step to take, all being called by some man running you ragged. It saps morale. It feels rigged, like you have to know the right strings to pull. It’s just more and more rigmarole.

Rigmarole. It could be such a nice thing, like eating rigatoni to the sound of a barcarolle. But no, it’s nothing but multifarious regulations made of murky regurgitated legal blither.

Or… well, how would you define rigmarole? Like the big runaround? A long litany of hocus-pocus? Legal blah-blah-blah? A verbal mugging? Or simply beleaguering gibberish? Or some other kind of verbal thingamajig?

Speaking of which, you may know this as rigamarole, with the extra a syllable to give it a rhythm like thingamajig or gobbledegook. But that’s just a needless addition – though, for that very reason, rather apposite. And the truth is that rigmarole is already an altered form. It is from – get ready for this – Ragman roll.

That’s kind of confusing or suspicious or disappointing, isn’t it? How is there rhyme or reason in that? What, for that matter, is a Ragman roll?

As it turns out, it’s two things, and there is disagreement about which of them it came from, and how the two are related and how either of them gave rise to rigmarole, and the various often lengthy discourses on historical minutiae never give a fully satisfying explanation.

The first Ragman Rolls are the… oh, here, I can’t even, I’m just going to quote this rigmarole from Wikipedia:

the collection of instruments by which the nobility and gentry of Scotland subscribed allegiance to King Edward I of England, during the time between the Conference of Norham in May 1291 and the final award in favour of Balliol in November 1292; and again in 1296. Of the former of these records two copies were preserved in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey (now in the National Archives (United Kingdom) at Kew), and it has been printed by Thomas Rymer. Another copy, preserved originally in the Tower of London, is now also in the National Archives. The latter record, containing the various acts of homage and fealty extorted by Edward from John Balliol and others in the course of his progress through Scotland in the summer of 1296 and in August at the parliament of Berwick, was published by Prynne from the copy in the Tower and now in the National Archives. Both records were printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1834.

Whoever all those people are, not one of them is Ragman. The further explanation, quoted from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is that Ragman Roll “originally meant the ‘Statute of Rageman’ (De Ragemannis), a legate of Scotland, who compelled all the clergy to give a true account of their benefices, that they might be taxed at Rome accordingly.” Which still does not explain the etymology.

But then there’s the second thing. There was a game of chance called Ragman, in which the key instrument was a roll of writings, called the Ragman roll, which had verses within it with strings attached to them, and you pulled a string and read the verse, which described some personal character (like a roll-playing game?). And… yeah, I don’t really get the picture either. But why the name? Merriam-Webster explains, “The roll was called a Ragman roll after a fictional king purported to be the author of the verses.” Which explains nothing. A ragman was someone who collected and dealt in rags, which was not a high social position, so applying the name to a king or noble seems to have been a derogation.

So perhaps the game is named after the Scottish records described above. Which, it has been suggested, are so called because the original was a number of rather ragged pieces of paper or parchment sewn together. And also perhaps to insult the king in question, Edward I (insults not being out of the ordinary when dealing with questions of royalty between Scotland and England). At the end, though, the histories and explanations, once unrolled, remain ragged, the connection between all of that and what we have now seems roughly stitched without further justification, and so we’ve learned a whole lot of not much.