Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Ange Zinsky and

James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite

facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that in the 19th century champion flowers were traded like Premier League footballers.

I don't know how exactly like Premier League football as it was but it wasn't for like £10

million. No exactly, I think the sums were a bit lower but there was a big thing where there were

lots of plowing competitions in the 19th century where you had to plow up and down a field and

there are all these metrics in plowing about whether you're doing it right or wrong and Squires

who had lots of plowmen would kind of pit them against each other and then the winners would win

a year's wages and then they might be transferred. Can I ask what a squire is because I associate

that with King Arthur times and this is the 19th century. Probably when it started. Yeah, so that's

a kind of assistant to a noble man isn't it? Okay, but in the later times it's more of a kind of

junior aristocrat sort of a slight landowner. Okay. Yeah. So for example you get the word

squire arki which is a word for quite affluent families from the country is it's not a very common

word. I think do you get the word? Don't use it casually in cup conversation. It is a less

common word. I think you used to get a squish up. Someone who was a squire and a bishop. That's great.

Again, don't use that in normal conversation. Is that do they just do that like Squircman who

delivers the milk but also a squire? Is that just a plice? Smashing the words. So it was landowners

and they would have these competitions so that their land got plowed basically and so like for

instance the first one ever in Kent was in 1867 on the first big one in Kent and that was run

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