<P> A book entitled Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735) states that Charles II passed an act "whereby any person with malice aforethought by lying in wait unlawfully cutting out or disabling the tongue, putting out an eye, slitting the nose or cutting off the nose or lip of any subject of His Majesty...shall suffer death ." This was called the Coventry Act, after Sir John Coventry MP, who had "had his nose slit to the bone" by attackers . </P> <P> Some have suggested that the idiom derives from the ostracism that became a fate of legendary Coventry's "Peeping Tom". However it is surprising that there is no recorded use between the 1050s (the origin of the tale) and the first possible example suggested by the Oxford English Dictionary, dated 1647 . Furthermore, there is no support for this derivation in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1981), the Oxford English Dictionary (1986), or Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1961). </P> <P> An early example of the idiom is from the Club book of the Tarporley Hunt (1765): </P> <P> Mr. John Barry having sent the Fox Hounds to a different place to what was ordered was sent to Coventry, but return'd upon giving six bottles of Claret to the Hunt . </P>

Where does the phrase sending you to coventry come from