Have any of you heard of the word "chancery" used to mean "hammerlock" in wrestling? My logophile friend says that 'getting out of chancery' can mean being in a 'hammerlock.' Is this use common?

No, I didn't even know the word. But here's here's one of the definitions I found in the OED Online":

quote:

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chancery

Pugilism. [From the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything, and the certainty of cost and loss to property ‘in chancery’.] A slang term for the position of the head when held under the opponent's left arm to be pommelled severely, the victim meanwhile being unable to retaliate effectively; hence sometimes figuratively used of an awkward fix or predicament.

1832 MARRYAT N. Forster xlvii, He'll not ‘put his head in chancery’, that's clear. 1858 O. W. HOLMES Aut. Breakf. T. (1883) 143, I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it him. 1877 BESANT & RICE Son of Vulc. I. ii. 28 What a thing it is to have your head in Chancery.

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Tinman

I can remember it being used in the sort of schoolboy tales I read fifty years ago. At some stage the school bully would usually get the hero's neck in chancery, and pummel him severely.

I have seen it occasionally more recently, but chiefly in the more figurative sense of "an awkward fix or predicament".

Interesting. Could the source be Dicken's view of the british court system, where being in court was an endless, inescapable and expensive predicament?

Jarvis v. Jarvis, from one of his novels, if I recall correctly?

Here is what my logophile friend says about it:

"Chancery was a special separate law system for dealing with inheritance cases. Once you got into it, you couldn't get out of it. And the courts paid themselves with money taken from the inheritance until the inheritance was used up.
So 'hammerlock' is a wrestling hold you can't get out of so it is ironic or sarcastic to call it 'chancery'."

If I recall from my law school days, chancery dealt with multiple kinds of cases; I don't know whether inheritance matters were included, but they certainly weren't primary.

According to my logophile friend, its use as "hammerlock" came from Dicken's "Bleak House."

"Bleak House" was published in 1852 and 1853. As you can see from the above quote from the OED (my Jan. 31 post), this meaning of chancery appeared in print in 1832, thirty years before "Bleak House" was published. It's true that Dickens used Chancery in nearly every chapter of "Bleak House," but it seems to refer to the Court of Chancery. Indeed, the only quote in the OED Online from "Bleak House" refers to the "court of the Lord Chancellor of England, the highest court of judicature next to the House of Lords":

quote:

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1853 DICKENS Bleak Ho. ix. 60 ‘There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the face of the earth.’

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If chancery as used in "Bleak House" meant hammerlock, it seems to me it would surely be recorded in the OED. Here is an online searchable reference to "Bleak House." Show me where Dickens used Chancery to refer to a hammerlock.

Tinman