Medieval tax collectors came to your door and demanded payment. You want to tell the Pope’s tax collector that you’re not going to pay?
You could offer to bribe him, with something less than the required penny or whatever it was – or “in kind”, in some way – to overlook you for now, and come back later when your financial situation might be better?
The modern meaning is not really ‘fiddling the books’ or anything illegal. The nearest equivalent that comes to mind is transferring credit from one card to another - not reducing the total debt, but buying some time on the latter.
And a common passtime among RCC folk, when done to saints - I was about to say “until quite recently” but nope, I know people who dress saints as part of their Church work nowadays. There’s many images which get different dresses either daily or for special occasions, and others which get “dressed in flowers” on specific holidays. My mother is president of the local chapter of the Friends of the Sacred Heart and they had a tiny tempest in the world’s smallest teapot over who’d make a new cloak for a local image: as one of the two candidates is a better sewer and the other one a better embroiderer, Madam President decreed that they would split the work along the lines of their ability.
Another expression related to this activity is quedarse para vestir santos (to be left for dressing saints; to dress nothing but saints) to describe an involuntary spinster.
As an image yes, but literally it’s to darning.
Concur. In fact, I have actually seen/heard it used in completely non-monetary contexts so as to be broadly equivalent to ‘swings and roundabouts’ or ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’.
“Six of one, half dozen of the other” has no real relation to “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. The former means basically “a tossup”, or that either way works just as well, take your pick; the latter is more comparable to the old DST joke about the guy who lengthened his blanket by cutting 12" off the bottom and sewing it onto the top.