Many people in rural Ireland still refer to children as childer. The old word, I'm glad to say, is unlikely to die out.
It has also survived in general dialect use in England and in those parts of Scotland where bairns isn't used. Tennyson, in a misguided attempt to do for Ireland what William Barnes did for Dorset, wrote, in a tear-jerker called To-morrow: "Him and his childer wor keenin' as if he had lost thim all."
There is a book to be written on the folklore of words. Innocents' Day, December 28th, once known throughout England as Childers' Day or Childermas Day, the latter term also used in Wexford, was regarded as one of the unluckiest in the year. So unlucky, in fact, that the day of the year on which it falls was marked as a black day for the whole year to come.
In Yorkshire no important affair was taken in hand on Childermas Day. Going on a sea voyage, or entering a house never previously entered was considered madness. To this day, many of the housewives of Cornwall refrain from washing anything, and I'm reliably informed that the news of a Childermas Day wedding in Newquay was greeted by the oldtimers last year with gasps of astonishment and pity.
This fear of the day which marks Herod's slaughter of the Innocents was mentioned as far back as 1711 in the Spectator: "No, child, you shall not begin upon Childermas Day; tell your master that Friday will be soon enough." Anyway, childer is Middle English. Wyclif has it. The Old English was cildru.
Mary Kelleher from Blackrock, Cork, asked about the word.
Flann Brennan from Skerries sent me a note about what I had to say about Hamlet's hawk being a plasterer's term, and not a bird, as Oxford insists. He sent me a copy of a recent bilingual Duchas, the Heritage Service, notice, which advertised for the tender of "oak noticeboards, routed and painted lettering".
Routed was the problem here. Litreoireacht bhealaigh (route lettering) was the translation of somebody who didn't know that rout was a carpenter's expression meaning to hollow out: a variant of root, what a pig does in the earth in search of food.
From Old English wrotan, by the way, related to Old English wrot, snout. Ah well. Ni bhionn saoi ar bith againn gan locht.