TWO Labour councillors, a Conservative and a journalist fell into earnest late night conversation this week in one of Darlington’s bars.

In a lull, the Conservative suddenly and unexpectedly asked: “Did you know that the word ‘indenture’ comes from the French for teeth?”

The Labour members contented themselves with trying to work out from where this piece of knowledge had abruptly arisen, while all the journalist could think of were the jagged edges of a dandelion leaf – so fiercely jagged that the name of the plant comes from the French, dents de lion, teeth of a lion.

A sober consultation of the dictionary the following morning revealed that our Conservative companion was correct.

In very olden times, a legal contract between two parties was handwritten twice on a single piece of parchment. The parchment was then cut down the middle so that each party could have a copy.

The cut was usually jagged, or toothlike, so that should a dispute have arisen, the two pieces could have been re-aligned and if the indents of the indenture had tallied, it would have proven that they were once part of the same document.

As a further security measure, a design or word – in earliest times, the word ‘chirograph’, meaning ‘written by hand’ in Latin – would have been artistically scrawled across the parchment before the cut was made so that both the design and the teeth had to tally to prove the contract was not a fake.

Such erudite conversations do we have in Darlington on our nights out.

AS I stumbled homeward that early morning, a steaming stream steadily growing from the darkness of one of High Row’s yards brought to mind the need for councillors to pass draconian by-laws to clean up such behaviour.

‘Draconian’ comes from Draco, who was the archon of Athens around 621BC. The archon was the head magistrate who laid down the laws. Our word ‘anarchy’ means ‘no archon’ – there was no one to lay down the law and so a state of lawlessness existed.

Draco was the first archon to write down all the crimes he could think of and then attach a punishment to them.

He started off by writing down minor misdemeanours, such as laziness, petty theft and urinating in public which – because he was indeed draconian – he felt deserved the death penalty.

When he moved onto the most serious crimes, like murder, or fiddling your Parliamentary expenses, he couldn’t think of a more severe punishment, so he stuck with death for them, too. Therefore, practically every crime in Athens was punishable by death.

A bit harsh, but at least, I guess, the streets of Athens didn’t have steaming streams steadily running down them after dark.

Subsequent archons removed all of Draco’s death penalities, except in cases of homicide.

Draco moved to the Greek island of Aegina, where he introduced a similarly draconian code of penalties. This cleaned up the mean streets of Aegina and the people were so grateful that they started throwing their clothes at him as a sign of their admiration.

It is not known whether he had them all sentenced to death for littering, but it does seem to be true that one day so many heavy overcoats were thrown at him by his thankful people that he suffocated and died.