Green’s Dictionary of Slang

to caress and stimulate the female or male genitals.

1602		Dekker Satiromastix III i: Let not thy tongue play so hard at hot-cockles.
c.1621		Middleton Women Beware Women I iii: Playing at hot-cockles with rich merchants’ wives, / Good to make sport withal when the chest’s full.
c.1650		Le Strange Merry Passages and Jeasts No. 433 121: Finding the Fellow on the Toppe of her, and his Breech bare, she went to Hott-Cockles with him.
1674		T. Duffet Epilogue Spoken by Heccate and Three Witches 30: What, you have been at Hot-Cockles I see, Beldames! how dare you traffick thus, and not call me?
1680–1		N. Lee Princess of Cleve V i: Kissing and Smacking, Puffing and Blowing so hard, you wou’d have sworn they had been at Hot cockles’.
1686		Behn Lucky Chance III v: ’Tis so, his gentlewoman has been at hot cockles without her husband, and he’s horn-mad upon it.
1701		Farquhar Sir Harry Wildair I i: Where d’ye think I found him? [...] Why, in the middle of a Monastry among a hundred and fifty Nuns, playing at Hot-cockles.
1727		M. Davys Accomplished Rake in McBurney 362: [He] had burnt his fingers playing at hot cockles with the drabs of Drury.
1810		‘Clown’s Peep into the Seraglio’ Batchelar’s Jovial Fellows Collection of Songs 3: When the grey mare is the better horse—and if the Ottomy ladies had but a little hedification at Billingsgate, the flat fish would soon prove themselves fine soles, and make it all hot cockles with the musclemen.
1830		‘Catalogue of Odd Fish’ Fleet-Street Collection 8: A lily white muscle’s a beau, / And hot cockles a game for the ladies.
1833		‘The Chapter Of Cocks’ in Swell!!! or, Slap-Up Chaunter 35: They roll’ ’neath the hay-cocks, had for tea, cocoa, / Then hot cockles played ’till time to go.
1980		Maledicta IV:2 (Winter) 197: Alternatively, she may like to play hot cockles or allow someone else to fumble, feel or finger-fuck her.