27 April: Keys

Today is the feast day of St Zita, invoked by people looking for lost keys. 10 facts about keys:

1. A key consists of two parts, the bit or blade, which slides into the lock, and is unique to the lock, and the bow, which is the bit the user turns.
2. When Viking women married, they became the keeper of the household's keys. They often wore them as signs of power and privilege and were even buried with them.
3. Roman women weren't so lucky – they were often the things being locked away by their menfolk, who would wear their keys as rings on their fingers. That meant not only that their keys were always handy (see what I did there?) but they were on display as a sign of status, that they were rich enough to have things to lock away.
4. A master key which can operate any lock is known as a skeleton key. It is so called because they are stripped down to their essential parts, or skeleton.
5. Keys were often designed in the shapes of animals or flowers in the handle. An old fashioned key is often quite aesthetically pleasing and they are sometimes worn as jewellery.
6. A person who collects keys is called a cagophilist.
7. A related word is copoclephilist, which means a person who collects key rings.
8. As of 2013 the champion cagophilist was Lisa Large of Kansas City, Missouri, who was awarded the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of keys – 3,604 of them.
9. In heraldry, keys sometimes appear on coats of arms. They frequently appear on arms related to the church, related to the fact that Saint Peter was promised the keys of Heaven. Vatican City and the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and York all include keys on their coats of arms.
10. The ceremony of the keys occurs every evening at 9.52 at the Tower of London. It's basically locking the tower up for the night and escorting the keys back to the Queen's residence. This ceremony has been held nightly since at least the 14th century and was only delayed once during World War II. In the olden days it was possible to buy tickets to watch the ceremony and they would be sold out a year in advance. Though since absolutely everything has been cancelled for the foreseeable future I've no idea whether they even have this ceremony any more, and even if they do, people certainly won't be allowed to go and watch it. Yet another thing we lost in 2020, probably.

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