"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 31/08/17 (darbies)

I had a nice e-mail from Rachel Davies, who asked... well, she'd been reading an old novel, and she said she came across the use of darbies for handcuffs. And she said, where on earth does that come from? The answer is it's pretty old. It's over 300 years old. And the term is a development of an earlier phrase which is a slightly curious one on the face of it and that's Father Darby's bands. And that reffered to an incredibly rigid straitjacket of a loan, really, that somebody would take out and would de banded firmly in the power of the moneylender. Not perhaps unlike some of those loans today, payday loans today. And many lender of the time were pretty unscrupulous, would often resorts to pretty violent means to get their money back. So essentially, if you were carrying Father Darby's bands, you were pretty much handcuffed to the moneylender with very little room for manoeuvre. The question of course is, who on earth was Father Darby? And it's really frustrating because history doesn't quite give us an answer. But it's been suggested that it goes back the one particularly unscrupulous money-monger who lived in the 16th century. And... I don't quite know why "Father". Perhaps that was a mocking nickname for him, but you certanly did not want to be within his power. But whatever the origin, darbies then settled in the lexicon as a criminal unredworld  and Darbies and Joanes were fetter which were linking a pair of criminals. So you would be possibly handcuffed to somebody else in jail. And a Darby roll was the type of walking that betrayed a former prisoner that can be kept in shackles because they had a slightly rolling gait because obviously they had been kept up fettered for so long. But I mentioned Darby and Joan and that's actually got a lovely history as well. We use it today, Darby and Joan, as a devoted old married couple really. And it goes back to 1735 and a poem in the Gentleman's Magazine ehich is an anonymous poem and it contained the lines, "Old Dardy, with Joan by his side / He is dropsical, she's sore-eyed / Yet they're never happy asunder". Which I think is quite pretty. Nothing to do with handcuffs in that one.