Cu31924029912734 the Myth of the Pent Cuckoo a Study in Folklore (1913)

8/13/2019 Cu31924029912734 the Myth of the Pent Cuckoo a Study in Folklore (1913)

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Cornell University LibraryGR735 .F45Myth of the pent cuckoo : a study in fol

olln3 1924 029 912 734


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THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOO


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The original of tiiis book is intile Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions inthe United States on the use of the text.

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THE SWYNCOMBE CUCKOO PENFROM THE NORTH.


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THE MYTH OFTHE PENT CUCKOOA STUDY IN FOLKLORE

BYJOHN EDWARD FIELD, M.A.

VICAR OF BENSON

Listen to these wild traditions, * *

Ye who love a nation's legends,Love the ballads of a people.That like voices from afar offCall to s to pause and listen.

Longfellow

LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK7 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G.


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PREFACEThe first purpose of this work includes a scientificenquiry into the meaning and value of the wide-spread story of the men who pent, or hedged in, theCuckoo, which appears in the old Tales of the WiseMen of Gotham and is also familiar in several partsof the country at the present day.

Its further purpose is to give an account of a seriesof sites bearing the traditional name of CuckooPens along the southern part of the Chiltern Hillsand in the neighbouring districts. Fifteen such sitesare known to me, and although I have made frequentenquiries I have not been able to hear of anotherbut probably there are several more. A descriptionof each of the fifteen is given with more or less detail.In the majority of cases this is done from personalinspection. In the other cases it is from accountscontributed by friends, and to these I desire to offeran expression of thanks. As far as I have hadopportunity of observing, the Cuckoo Pens do notappear in Tithe Awards or Enclosure Awards, butthe designation survives only in popular parlance.Sometimes it has passed out of the knowledge of thevillagers generally and is only handed down by those


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vi PREFACEwho are connected with the particular spot of ground.In one instance, where it was well known a quarterof a century ago, it is difficult to trace any recollec-tion of it now. But in two instances I have seen itnoted in the prospectus of a sale of land.

Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., in his Riverside Letters(ix. p. 68) describes the downs which jut out likepromontories from the flanks of the Chilterns intothe plains below.The tops of these jutting spurs are more or less

devoid of wood, though most of them are dottedabout with juniper bushes, and some have on theirsummits isolated clumps of trees which are in thispart of the country called Cuckoo Pens. I supposepen means a hill or peak, but how cuckoo comes inI know not.And Mr. A. D. Godley, in Oxford Country, referring

to this passage, suggests that the name must beidentical with that of a prominent hill on the Berk-shire ridge surmounted by a lofty mound and knownas Cuckhamslow (Cwichelms-hlaew) or ScutchamflyKnob. It suffices to reply that Cwichelm the sonof Cynegils was under-king in Berkshire and wouldnot be likely to leave his name on several spots inOxfordshire. But the Cuckoo Pens, like Cuckhams-low, are marked in most cases by some object ofantiquarian interest which will merit particularnotice.Of all the tales which the folklore of our country

has handed down, the Cuckoo myth is certainly oneof the most curious and interesting. And the district


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PREFACE viiof the Cuckoo Pens is full of associations which havean attractive charm to the tourist and the holiday-maker, as well as abundant interest to the historianand the antiquary. It is hoped, therefore, that boththe general reader and the student may find in thiswork something that deserves attention. The subjectwould have been worthy of a technical treatise forthe study of antiquarian readers ; but it has seemeddesirable to treat it in a popular way, and to introducehistorical notes and a variety of illustrative matter,in the hope that this may commend it to the widercircle of readers who care for the old tales andlegends of our land and for objects of general interestin its antiquities.Books from which materials have been drawn are

named as occasion requires. But special mentionmust be made here of two works to which I amlargely indebted. One of these is All about theMerry Tales of Gotham, by Mr. Alfred Stapleton ofNottingham, where some of my conclusions wereanticipated. The other is the Rev. EdmundMcClure's British Place-Names in their HistoricalSetting.The substance of my account of the Medlers

Bank at Benson has appeared in the Berks, Bucksand Oxon ArchaeologicalJournal, ii. 45-50 (1896).

J. E. F.


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CONTENTSCHAPTER

I. THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAMII. ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALESHI. GOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIREIV. GOTHAM IN SUSSEX -V. THE CUCKOO-PENNERS

VI. THE CUCKOO MYTH IN CORNWALL -VII. THE COUNTRY OF THE CUCKOO PENSVIIL TWO CHILTERN BOUNDARY DYKES -IX. A SERIES OF CHILTERN CUCKOO PENSX, A BUCKINGHAMSHIRE CUCKOO PEN -

XI. SOME THAMES-SIDE CUCKOO PENS -XII. TWO BERKSHIRE CUCKOO PENSXIII. SOME COTSWOLD FOLKLORE -XIV. GOTHAM TALES IN NORFOLKXV. A NORFOLK OWL PENXVI. CUCKOO LORE -XVII. ETYMOLOGY OF CUCKOO PENXVIII. THE CUCKING FOLK

7ACSI

1225364S58678199109127136147I516S177186198


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSPACING rAGETHE SWYNCOMBE CUCKOO PEN - Frontispiece

DOWNTON MOOT HILL - - 5WITTENHAM HILLS - 1 37THE SPOUTS COMMON, HOLT, NORFOLK - - 175


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THEMYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOO

CHAPTER ITHE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM

One of the most popular chap-books which amusedour forefathers was a series of twenty short storiesbearing the title of The Merry Tales of the Wise Menof Gotham ; the name of the place being sometimeswritten, as it is pronounced, Gottam. Amongthem The Third Tale runs as follows :

On a time the men of Gottam would have pinnedin the Cuckoo, whereby shee should sing all theyeere, and in the midst of the town they made ahedge round in compasse, and they had got a Cuckoo,and had put her into it, and said. Sing here all theyeere, and thou shalt lacke neither meat nor drinke.The Cuckoo as soone as she perceived her selfeincompassed within the hedge, flew away. A ven-geance on her said they. We made not our hedgehigh enough.This extract is taken from a curious little black-

letter copy in the Bodleian Library, which is theoldest now forthcoming. It is entitled The Merry


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2 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOTales of the Mad-men of Gottam. Gathered to-gether by A. B. of Physicke Doctor. Printed atLondon by B. A. and T. F. for Michael Sparke,dwelling in Greene Arbor at the sign of the BlueBible, 1630. The compiler to whom this titleattributes the collection is Andrew Borde, of whommore must be said; and the printers are BernardAlsop and Thomas Fawcet. But we shall findnumerous proofs, presently to be noticed, showingthat the collection had already been current for acentury before the date of this edition. It has beenfrequently reprinted in recent years, and it will besufficient for our present purpose to give a few ofthe principal tales and a general sketch of the re-mainder, for the sake of such light as they maythrow upon the one with which we are principallyconcerned, and also for the sake of illustrating thedate and history of the very eccentric compilation.The twenty tales, with one or two exceptions,

agree in attributing extraordinary stupidity to themen of Gotham, and while some of them are suffi-ciently amusing the wit of others is feeble and point-less. The following is The First Tale.

There was two men of Gottam, and the one ofthem was going to the market to Nottingham to buysheepe, and the other came from the market : andboth met together upon Nottingham-bridge : Wellmet, said the one to the other : Whither be yee going?said he that came from Nottingham. Marry, said hethat was going thither, I go to the market to buysheepe. Buy sheepe, said the other, and which way


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THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM 3wilt thou bring them home ? Marry, said the other,I will bring them over this bridge : By Robinhood,said he that came from Nottingham, but thou shaltnot. By Maidmarrian, said he that was goingthitherward, but I will. Thou shalt not, said theone. I will, said the other. Ter here, said the oneShue there, said the other. Then they beate theirstaves against the ground, one against the other, asthere had beene an hundred sheepe betwixt them.Hold in, said the one. Beware the leaping over thebridge of sheepe, said the other. I care not, said theother ; they shall not come this way, said the oneBut they shall, said the other. . . And as they wereat their contention, another man of Gottam camefrom the market with a sack of meale upon a horse,and seeing and hearing his neighbours at strife forsheepe and none betwixt them, said. Ah fooles, willyou never learn wit ? Helpe me, said he that hadthe meale, and lay my sacke upon my shoulder ; theydid so. And he went to the one side of the bridge,and unloosed the mouth of the sacke, and did shakeout all his meale into the River. Now neighbours,said the man, how much meale is there in my sackenow ? Maiy there is none at all, said they. Nowby my faith, said he, even as much wit is in yourtwo heads, to strive for that thing you have not.Which was the wisest of all these three persons,judge you ?The Second Tale tells how a man of Gottam did

ride to the market with two bushells of wheate, andbecause his horse should not beare heavy, he carried


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4 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOhis corne upon his owne necke, and did ride uponhis horse, because his horse should not carry toheavy a burthen.The next is the Cuckoo tale, with which we began.

The fourth also is distinctly humorous : There was a man of Gottam the which went to

the market at Nottingham to sell cheese, and as hewas going downe the hill to Nottingham-bridge oneof his cheese did fall out of his wallet and ran downethe hill. Said the fellow, can you run to the marketalone ? I will send the one after the other of you.Then he layd downe his wallet and tooke the cheesesand did tumble them downe the hill one after another,and some ran into one bushe and some into another.And at the last he said, I charge you all to meet mein the Market-place. And when the fellow cameinto the Market-place to meet his cheeses he stayedthere till the market was almost done. Then hewent about and did enquire of his neighbors andother men, if they did see his cheeses come to themarket ? Who should bring them, said one of themarket-men? Marry themselves, said the fellow,they knew the way well enough. He said, a venge-ance on them all, I did feare to see my cheeses runso fast, that they would run beyond the market : Iam now fully perswaded that they bee now almost atYorke. Whereupon he forthwith hired a horse toride to Yorke to seeke his Cheeses, where they werenot. But to this day no man could tell him of hischeeses.

The Fift Tale also is worth transcribing


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THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM sThere was a man of Gottam, who bought at

Nottingham a Trevet or Brandyron, and as he wasgoing home his shoulders grew sore with the cariagethereof, and he set it downej and seeing that it hadthree feet, said, hast thou three feet and I but two ?Thou shalt beare me home if thou wilt, and so set itdowne on the ground, and set himself downe there-upon, and said to the Trevet, beare me as long as Ihave borne thee, for if thou doe not thou shalt standstill for me. The man of Gottam did see that hisTrevet would not goe further, Stand still, said he, inthe Mare's [Mayor's] name and follow me if thouwilt, I will tell thee the right way to my Home.When he did come to his house, his wife said, whereis my Trevet? The man said, he hath three legsand I have but two, and I did teach him the way tomy house, let him come home if he will. Where leftye the Trevet, said the wife ? At Gottam hill, saidthe man. The wife did runne and fetch home theTrevet her owne selfe, or else she had lost it throughher husbands wit.

The Sixth Tale is of a smith that had a waspesnest in the straw in the end of his Forge, and setfire to the straw because a man was stung when hebrought his horse to be shod.

The Seaventh Tale has some points of specialinterest to which we shall have occasion to makefurther referenceWhen that good-Friday was come, the men of

Gottam did cast their heads together what to do-with their white Herring, their red Herring, their


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6 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOSprats and salt Fish. One consulted with theother, and agreed that \ such fish should be castinto their Pond or poole (the whiche was in themiddle of the Towne) that it might increase againstthe next yeere, and every man that had any Fishleft did cast them into the Poole. The one said,I have thus many white Herrings ; another said, Ihave thus many Sprats ; another said, I have thusmany red Herrings : and the other said, I have thusmany salt Fishes. Let all goe together into thePoole or Pond, and we shall fare like Lords the nextLent : At the beginning of the next Lent following,the men did draw the Pond to have their Fish, andthere was nothing but a great Eele. Ah saidjheyall, a mischeife on this Eele, for he hath eate up allour Fish. What shall we do with him, said the oneto the other ? Kill him, said the one of them. Chophim all to pieces, said another. Nay, not so, saidthe other. Let us drowne him : be it so, said all.They went to another Poole or Pond by, and didcast in the Eele into the water. Lye there, said theyand shift for thyselfe, for no helpe thou shalt haveof us. And there they left the Eele to be drowned.The Eighth Tale relates that the men of Gottam

had forgotten to pay their rent, and pay-day was onthe morrow; they feared that it would not reachtheir landlord in time ; but one of them said that hehad taken a hare, and he shall carry it, for he isvery quickfooted ; to which they all agreed : andthey wrote a letter and put the money in a purseand tied them about the hare's neck, saying, First


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THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM 7thou must go to Loughborow, and then to Leicester,and at Newark there is our Lord, and commend usto him, and there is his dutie. [This Newark is notthe town of that name, but the new wark whichthe earls of Leicester added to their castle in theearlier half of the fourteenth century, and in whichthey resided ; and the village of Gotham was a de-pendency of the honour of Leicester at that period.]The hare, however, did run a cleane contrary way.Some cried to him to go to Loughborough first; some said. Let the hare alone, hee can tell a nearerway then the best of us all doe, let him goe : anothersaid, it is a subtle Hare, let her alone, she will notkeepe the highway for feare of dogs.The Ninth Tale will hardly bear abbreviation :On a time there was one of Gottam was amowing in the meads and found a great Gras-

hopper : he cast downe his sithe and did run hometo his neighbours and said that there was a Divellin the field that hopped in the grasse : then therewas every man ready with Clubs and Staves withHalberts and other weapons to goe and kill the Gras-hopper : when they did come to the place where theGrashopper should be, said the one to the other, letevery man crosse himselfe from the Divell, or wewill not meddle with him. And so they returnedagaine, and said, we were well blessed this day thatwe went no further. Ah cowards, said he that hadthe Sithe in the mead. Helpe me to fetch my Sithe :no, said they, it is good to sleepe in a whole skin,better it is to loose the sithe than to marre us all.


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8 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOIn the Tenth Tale, twelve men of Gotham went

fishing; some waded in the water, others stayed onland. Afterwards they told themselves and everyman did tell eleven, and the twelfth man did nevertell himselfe. Alas, said the one to the other, thereis some one of us drowned. They went backe tothe brooke where they had been fishing and soughtup and down for him that was drowned and did makegreat lamentation. A Courtier did come riding byand he did ask what it was they did seeke and whythey were so sorry. When they had told him,Well, said the Courtier, what will you give me andI will finde out twelve men ? Sir, said they, all themoney that we have. Give me the money, said theCourtier : and hee began with the first and did givehim a recombendibus over the shoulders that hegroaned, and said, there is one : so he served all.The Eleventh Tale describes a man of Gotham

riding from Nottingham and attempting to pick upwith his sword a cheese that lay by the wayside, buthis sword was too short, and he rode back toNottingham to buy a longer one ; while in the mean-time another rider had dismounted and carried thecheese away.The remaining tales are the least interesting of

the series. Most of them are of a different characterfrom the first eleven; for instead of attributing foolishactions to the Gothamites, they merely relate certainjests more or less humorous, and some, it must beadded, more or less coarse, which were made bythem. Two of them are the famihar stories in the


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THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM 9one case of the Gossips, or sponsors, at a baptism,and in the other case of the bridegroom at a marriage,being admonished that they must repeat certainthings after the priest and persisting in saying afterhim every remark that he had occasion to make andevery question that he asked of them, until in theone case the priest was compelled to provide newgodfathers and godmothers and in the other case todefer the marriage until the man could be betterinstructed.

In the Fourteenth Tale a man of Gotham invited four or five gentlemen's servants to eat a bustardwhich he had caught, but in the meantime his wifewith two of her gossips ate it and served up forthe husband and his guests an old goose, which thehost strenuously affirmed to be a bustard ; and heshook out the goose's feathers from a bag to proveit; whereupon he received for his reward a dozenstripes with a waster or cudgel.The Fifteenth Tale tells of a young man of Gotham

who was advised by his mother to cast a sheep'seye at a fair maid whom he was wooing ; and hewent to the butcher and bought seven or eightsheep's eyes for the purpose.The Nineteenth Tale demands notice because we

learn from its introductory words that the compilerof the book was aware of the existence ofother suchtales which he did not include in it. It refers to the old time when these aforesaid jests (as men of thecountry reported), and such fantastical matters weredone at Gottam, which I cannot tell half. The


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10 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOstory is of the wives of Gotham being gathered to-gether in an ale-house and relating to one anotherhow they were profitable to their husbands. Nineof them describe their various plans, but a few ex-amples will suffice. One declared that she couldneither bake, brew, nor work, and therefore she keptevery day holiday and prayed for her husband athome, and when she could not go to church she wentto the ale-house. Another made her household goto bed by daylight all the winter so that she mightprofit her husband by saving the candles. A thirddrank so much good ale that she cared for no meatand so saved the bread. Another went to the ale-house to save fires, and anotherwashed her husband'sclothes but once a year to save soap. Lastly, the ale-wife herself drank all her husband's ale lest it shouldget sour.The Twentieth Tale is a very curious one. On Ashwednesday the Priest of Gottam would

have a Collation [that is, a Conference, or Address]to his Parishioners, and said, Friends, the time iscome that you must use prayer and fasting andalmesdeedes, and this weeke come you to shrift, andI will tell you more of my mind, for as for prayers, Ithink there bee not two persons in the Parish cansay halfe their Pater-noster. As for fasting, you faststill : for you have not a good meales meate throughthe whole yeere. As for almesdeedes, what shouldyou do to give any thing, that have nothing to taketo ? But when that you come to shrift, I will tellyou more of my mind after Masse. The good man


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THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM iithat did keepe the Ale-house did come to shrift, andabove all things he confessed himselfe to be drunkedivers times in the yeere, specially in Lent. ThePriest said, in Lent thou shouldest most refrainefrom drunkennesse and abstaine from drinke. Notso, said the fellow, for it is an old Proverbe, thatfish must swim. Yea, said the Priest, it mustswim in water : I cry you mercy, quoth the fellow,I thought it should have swom in good Ale. Soone after another the men of Gottam did cometo shrift, and when they were shriven, the priestsaid, I cannot tell what penance to give you. If Ishould enjoyne you to prayer, there is none of youthat can say your Pater noster, and you be now tooold to learne. And to enjoyne you to fast, it werebut foolishnesse, for you doe not eate a good mealesmeat in a yeere, wherefore I doe enjoyne thee tolabour well all the weeke, that thou maist fare wellto dinner on the Sun-dayes, and I will come todinner and see it be so and take part : Another manhe did enjoyne to fare well on Munday and anotherthe Teusday, and one after another, that one or othershould fare well once a weeke, that he might havepart of meat. And as for almes-deedes the Priestsaid : You be but beggers all, except it be one ortwo, therefore bestow your almes on your selves.


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CHAPTER IIANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES

Several interesting questions arise in connectionwith the Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham. Thefirst that naturally occurs is the question when theywere compiled. The antiquity of the collection as awhole appears at once in the social customs andreligious observances which are prominent in manyof them, though not actually in the Cuckoo story.The allusions to the Pater Noster and the Mass, thecoming to shrift and the penance, in the last tale ;the demand, in the ninth, that each man should crosse himselfe from the Divell before he couldventure to meddle with him ; the quaint story of theherrings and sprats and salt fish which remainedat the end of Lent and were to be kept for thenext Lent, as told in the seventh tale; all theseare points which could not have appeared in popularstories written after the reign of Henry VHLAnd the external evidence shows that they werecollected at this period in the form in which theyhave come down to us.No copy is known to exist of earlier date than that

of 1630, which has been described already. ButAnthony a Wood in his Athence Oxonienses, written

12


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 13at the close of the seventeenth century, says thatthese tales were printed at London in the time ofKing Henry VIII. Mr. Halliwell, who reprinted theseries in 1840, mentions a copy of an edition issuedat the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, andMr. Carew-Hazlitt records others of the earlierpart of the seventeenth century. Editions of a laterdate were published not only in London but inseveral provincial towns, as Newark, Coventry,Hull, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and also in New York.One was printed at Stirling as lately as 1829. It isa remarkable fact that only eleven years after thechap-book was last printed for the amusement ofthe populace it was reprinted in London as a literarycuriosity. The earlier impressions seem to haveperished, says Mr. Carew-Hazlitt, who has includedthe tales in his volumes of Shakespeare Jest Books,and he adds, When the excessive popularity ofsuch a piece is considered, we can hardly wonderthat all trace of the book in its original shape shouldhave been lost. It was edited anew in 1900 byMr. Arthur Stapleton of Nottingham, with a varietyof illustrative matter.The first known allusion to the fools of Gotham

occurs in the earliest collection of miracle-playsthat has come down to us, known as the TowneleyMysteries. They are contained in a manuscriptwhich is believed to have belonged, to WidkirkAbbey in Yorkshire and was written not later thanthe middle of the fifteenth century. A facsimile otthe passage is given by Mr. Stapleton as a frontis-


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14 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOpiece to his volume. The play represents theAdoration of the Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.The first shepherd is soUloquising upon the uncer-tainty of life and likening it to the variableness ofthe weather, and the second shepherd enters andquarrels with him; whereupon Jak Garcio (agavQon) appears on the scene and parts them. Heexclaims :

Now God gyf you care : foles al sam.Sagh I never none so fare : bot the foles of Gotham.Wo is hir that yow bare: youre syre and youre dam.had been well

Had she broght furth an hare : a shepe or a lam.Or in modern English

Now God give' care to you, fools all togetherSaw I never none go thus but the fools of Gotham.Woe is her that bare you, your sire and your dam.It had been wellHad she brought forth a hare, a sheep, or a lamb.

Another early allusion, cited in Collier's Historyof Dramatic Poetry, is in the Comedy of Misogonuswhich was produced about the year 1560, whereCacurgus, or the Mischief-Maker, who is the domesticfool of the family, cries : Ha ha ha ha ha, I mustneds laughe in my slefe : the wise men of Gotum arerisen againe.The author of Philotimus, in 1583, is quoted as

proving that he knew the collection of stories in thefamiliar chap-book half a century before the date ofthe earliest edition that we now possess ; for healludes to the men of Gotam tying their rents in apurse about the hare's neck, as we have it in the


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 15Eighth Tale. Collier gives us also a comedy entitledA Knack to know a Knave, by Will Kemp, who wasfamous as a player in the reign of Elizabeth. It hadalready been performed for a few years when it wasfirst printed in 1594; and it is the more interestingbecause it calls them the mad men of Goteham (not the wise men ), and therefore it is evidentlybased upon the chap-book of stories, affording anadditional proof that this was well known at leastforty years before the date of the oldest edition thatsurvives. It also illustrates the great popularity ofthe tales at that period; for though the merriment,or burlesque, of the Men of Goteham is only onebrief scene in the play, it appears on the title-pageas if it were the chief substance of it. Moreover, itconnects the tales with the visit of a King to Gotham,to which we shall have occasion to refer hereafter.There is a quaint allusion in The Accedence of

Armorie by Gerard Leigh, published in 1597, thefirst English book upon the subject of blazoningarms :

Gentlemen should not suffer Little John or Muchthe Miller's sonne to be araied in cotes of armes, asI have scene some wear at Whitsontide in May-polemirth, which have bin pulled downe and given tothem, by the Churchwardens of Gotham. Whoe, notonelie by a long deliberate doubt, drowned an Eele,but by advise of John of the same towne banished asnaile : which deed done, he was demanded of thetownes-men what it was : quod John, it is eithersomething or nothing. None doo more hurt to the


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i6 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOmemory of your auncestors then such or such likeof whom it greeveth me to tell of.Here the banishment of a snail is added to the

drowning of the eel. And we have seen how thechap-book itself acknowledges that it does not con-tain by any means all the tales that were told aboutthe men of Gotham. Mr. Hazlitt mentions an addi-tional series which appeared in 1637, under the titleof The Second Part of the Wise Men of Gotham, butnothing is known of its contents. Numerous stories,however, have been collected by different writers.Mr. Stapleton, for instance, gives us several. Themen of Gotham chained a wheelbarrow which a maddog had bitten, lest it should bite others. Theyhauled a cow to the roof of a house to eat off agrowth of vegetation, and when the rope round herneck was throttling her they thought that her dyinggroans showed the delight with which she regardedthe prospect of this pasture. Two brothers quar-relled about the pasturage of their oxen, one of themwishing to have as many oxen as he could see starsand the other wishing to have pasturage as wide asthe firmament; and they fought about it till eachkilled the other. A woman of Gotham was enjoinedby her husband to wet the meal before she gave itto the pigs, and she carried out his directions bythrowing the meal into the well and then throwingthe pigs in afterwards. Another woman was goingto market with her husband, and on the way heasked her whether she had pulled the door after herwhen she left the house ; finding she had forgotten


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 17it, he sent her back to do so ; and as he waited forher return he presently saw her toiling towards himand with a strong rope pulling the door after heralong the road.Mr. Halliwell also has brought together a variety

of similar stories, most of them equally foolish ; butsome are of interest because of their great antiquity.For example : Some of the Gothamites were walkingby a river where cross-currents caused the water toboil as in a whirlpool, and they brought a quantityof oatmeal, for it seemed an opportunity for makingenough hasty porridge to serve the village for amonth : but after they had thrown the oatmeal in,how should they know when it was ready? Onewas to jump in and report upon it ; but the waterwas deeper than he had expected; thrice he rose,and said nothing ; they supposed he meant that theporridge was good ; they jumped in eagerly to getpossession of it, and all were drowned.Another tale is that they found a hedgehog in the

fields, and when none could tell what animal it wasthey declared it to be one of those which Adamhad never named. There is the story also whichtakes the form of a nursery rhyme

Three wise men of GothamWent to sea in a bowlAnd if the bowl had been strongerMy tale had been longer.Again, the Gothamites had only one knife among

them, and they stuck it in a tree in the middleof the village where all might use it, but the con-


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i8 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOsequent disputes were troublesome. This seemsto carry us back to very early days, when the usualplace of meeting for public business in each littletribal community was a tree in the middle of thevillage; just as still in some remote places thetradition of it has been preserved in a tree wherepublic notices are posted, sometimes with a rusticseat around it, and sometimes crowning the burial-mound of an ancient chieftain. The common knifeof the primitive villages might fitly be entrusted tothe custody of the tree in the middle of the villagewith which so many public interests were connectedand which even bore a certain note of sanctity.

In another tale one of the men of Gotham wasabroad one night when the rest were in bed, andseeing the moon's reflection in the horse pond of thevillage he thought it was green cheese, and rousedall his neighbours from their slumbers that theymight help him to draw it out, with a view, it wouldseem, to a nocturnal feast upon the cheese. Thevery absurdity of the story suggests the thoughtthat it must have had some meaning which is lostand it is certainly possible that it may embody somereminiscence of primitive moon-worship and themidnight orgies that went with it. At any rate, thejoke of the moon's reflection being mistaken for acheese, and of fools attempting to get it from thewater, is a tale of very old times. It appears, forexample, in ancient Arabian fables ; and we find itin a collection of such fables quaintly compiled as atreatise on Clerical Discipline by Petrus Alphonsus,


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 19a Jew who became a Christian, with King AlphonsusI. of Arragon for his godfather, in the early years ofthe twelfth century, and whose work was popularenough to be translated from the Latin into more thanone French version. In another form of the storythe actual moon in the sky is the cheese, as we shallpresently meet with it in the tales told of Lorbottle inNorthumberland. And thus again we have it in thenursery rhyme of The Three Jovial Huntsmen

And all the night they hunted,And nothing could they findBut the moon a-gliding,A-gliding with the wind.

One said it was the moon,The other said nay

The third said it was a cheeseAnd half o't cut away.

It is evident, therefore, that these stories had theirseveral beginnings in various ages and were notoriginally connected either with Gotham or with anyother single locality. The chap-book of the twentyGotham Tales is no doubt a collection of such mis-cellaneous stories as came in the compiler's way,and very likely some of them were of his owninvention. Knowing the old tradition that the menof Gotham achieved some supremely ridiculousaction, an ingenious story-teller published his col-lection of tales in which he attributed them all to thesame people, so that eventually, when the collectionhad caught the popular fancy, the Wise Men ofGotham were credited with every odd absurditythat could be devised.


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20 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOIn all probability, as we shall have occasion to

see, the one foundation-story around which all therest were made to hang was the Penning of theCuckoo. Certainly that story is the generalfavourite of the series. Its subject forms the frontis-piece of the old copy of 1630, where a woodcut uponthe title-page depicts an enclosure of hurdles, orrailings, in which on one side is a countrymandressed in tall hat, open doublet, trunk-hose andshoes, and armed with a hooked staff, and on theother side is a bird seated upon a tree, while labelsissuing from their mouths represent the man as ex-claiming Coocou, and the bird, Gotam. Similardevices adorn the title-pages of most of the oldeditions, and some of these are reproduced by Mr.Stapleton, in each of which the man and the birdare surrounded by a circular wattled enclosure.The story appears in a variety of forms. One

account is that the men of Gotham had often heardthe cuckoo but had never seen her, and thereforehedged in a bush from whence her note seemed tocome, in the hope of catching her. Another accounttells of their joining their hands round the bush toshut her in. In another, they threw up a circularbank of earth around the bush ; and this is a form ofthe story which we shall have occasion to noticefurther in attempting to trace out the origin of it.The frequent allusions in old writers show thatthe Cuckoo story was very widely current. Wefind it, for instance, in George Wither, the Puritanpoet who published in 161 3 his satirical verses, en-


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 21titled Abuses Stript and Whipt, and was imprisonedfor it, and afterwards sold his patrimony to raise atroop of soldiers for the Parliament. In the SeventhSatire of the First Book, Of Jealousie, he has theselines

But this is true, to seek for to restraineA woman's will, is labour spent in vaine ;And he that tries to doe it, might have binOne of the crew that hedg'd the Cuckoo in.

And Fulke Greville, Philip Sidney's friend, theElizabethan soldier-poet whom James I. createdBaron Brooke, writes in one of his sonnets :

If doubt doe darken things held deare.Then well-fare nothing once a yeare ;For many runne, but one must winne,Fooles only hedge the Cuckoe in.

There is also a curious satirical brochure com-posed by Laud in 1613, when he was President OfSt. John's College in Oxford. It was never pub-lished, but Mr. Stapleton gives portions of it whichhave been printed in Notes and Queries. The occa-sion of it was an outbreak in the University origina-ting from a foolish controversy; some membershaving objected to the undignified custom of theVice-Chancellor and Doctors taking their places inthe Convocation House bareheaded ; and when thequarrel grew so serious that it was proposed torepeat the experiment of an older period and founda college at Stamford, the future archbishop be-thought him of bringing contempt upon it by hisridicule. He therefore described the proposedfoundation of Gotham College, and its charter of


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22 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOliberties, in which leave is granted to the Fellowsthat they may remove Cuckoo Bush and set it insome part of the College garden, and that in remem-brance of their famous predecessors they shall breeda Cuckoo every year and keep him in a pound tillhe be hoarse, and then in midsummer moon deliverhim to the bush and set him at liberty. Drownedeel was to be part of their fare on fish-days, andcheese of the same dairy with that cheese whichtheir wise predecessors rolled down the hill togo to market before them. For exercise theywere allowed no walking in the summer but tolook for birds' nests, especially the cuckoo ; theirelections were to be at cuckoo-time, and theymust swear by nothing but by the cuckoo or bythe swine that taught Minerva. To the headship ofthe College the rectory of Gotam is to be annexed.Thus Wise Men of Gotham became a proverbial

title for any who were to be charged with folly ; andMr. Stapleton quotes, as the most eminent illustra-tion of this, the fact that when Washington Irvingcaricatured the wisdom of the people of New Yorkhe called the city by the satirical name of Gotham,which has since become recognised as speciallybelonging to it.When the art of printing became more general, agood many collections of tales, of a similar characterto the very popular Gotham Tales, appeared. Mr.Carew-Hazlitt's volumes contain reprints of severaljest-books which are supposed to have been used byShakespeare, and of which the original copies are


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ANTIQUITY OF THE GOTHAM TALES 23very rare. The collection of The Hundred MeryTales, published in 1526, exists only in a single copypreserved in the. Royal Library at Gottingen; andthe first of the Gotham Tales, of the three wise menquarrelling about the sheep on Nottingham Bridge,is included also, in a slightly varied form, among thehundred ; but no doubt both collections took it froman earlier source. Other collections, which followedsoon after the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign,are the Mery Tales and Quicke Answers, and theMerie Tales of Skelton, Poet Lauriat. Anotherfavourite set was the Jests of Scogin, which havebeen attributed to Andrew Borde, the reputed editorof the Gotham Tales ; but none of these ever rivalledthat famous series in its wide popularity.

If we go back to older days, a comparisonsuggests itself between the Gotham Tales and theequally popular and somewhat similar collection of.sop's Fables. iEsop is said to have visited Athensat the time when the people were oppressed by theusurpation of the despot Pisistratus in the sixthcentury before the Christian era, and he tried toraise their spirits by giving them the fable of theFrogs who petitioned Jupiter for a King; the godthereupon dropped a wooden log into the pond, andat first they fled in alarm at the splash ; but soondiscovering that their King was motionless theycame back and sat upon him, and then beggedJupiter for another ; but he was angry and sent thema stork, or in another version a water-serpent, whichseized them and devoured them. Afterwards iEsop


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24 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOcame to Delphi, where he so greatly annoyed thepeople that they condemned him to death; andwhile they led him to the precipice from which hewas to be thrown down, he warned them that hisdeath would be avenged, telling them the fable ofthe eagle who laid her eggs on Jupiter's lap forsafety, but a hornet startled the god and made himdrop them. One or two more such stories are alsoattributed to iEsop ; and these became the nucleusto which others were added from time to timetheDog in the Manger, the Fox and the Grapes, theHare and the Tortoise, and many more, until in thecourse of centuries upwards of two hundred of suchfables were grouped together under .^sop's name,and collections of them were often called Ysopets.Each of these stories is of course intended to point amoral. But the Gotham Tales are mere jests ; andwhatever point of interest any of them may havehad in their origin, they are put together for noother purpose than to provoke a smile.


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CHAPTER IIIGOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

The Gotham Tales, in the form in which the popularchap-book gives them, are connected with a villageof that name near the south-west corner of Notting-hamshire. The proverb, As wise as a man ofGotham, is quoted by the famous collector of oldstories, Thomas Fuller, in the Nottinghamshiresection of his Worthies of England, published in1662, where he explains that It passeth publickly forthe Periphrasis of a Fool, and an hundred Fopperiesare feigned and fathered on the Town-folk ofGotham,a Village in this County.Gotham stands in an isolated position, some two

miles from any other village and about midwaybetween Nottingham and Loughborough. TheWolds rise to a considerable height on the west ofit, and the broad marshes into which they drainspread eastward of it. Several of the tales allude toNottingham as the market-town which the villagersfrequented, and one of them implies that York wasnot very remote, while another mentions Lough-borough and Leicester as towns in the neighbour-hood ; whence it is evident that the collection has

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26 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOObeen adapted by a compiler who was acquaintedwith the district.But some of the tales, as Mr. Stapleton points

out, are hardly consistent with such a place asGotham. Town life is implied in the story whichtells of four or five gentlemen's servants beinginvited to a dinner, and in that which alludes to abutcher's shop where several sheep's heads wereready at hand, and in others which speak of con-siderable households where provisions were plentiful.Nor can we suppose that the lord of the castle wasthelperson at]whom the ridicule of the Eleventh Talewas aimed ; yet there could hardly be a second manof Gotham who would carry a sword at his sidewhen he rode to Nottingham. The parish priest,too, in the last tale, is a needy man, contriving toinvite himself to a constant succession of meals withhis humbler parishoners, whereas the rectory ofGotham was well endowed. And in the Cuckoostory itself there is an inconsistency, for it relatesthat the bird was hedged round in the midst of thetown, whereas the spot at Gotham known as theCuckoo Bush is some distance outside the village.According to a little publication of the year 1751,

entitled England's Gazeteer, this village of Gothamis noted for nothing so much as the ridiculousfable of the wise men here, who, 'tis said, went aboutto hedge in a cuckow. What original it had does notappear, though at Court Hill in this place there is abush called Cuckow Bush. The fable, as we shallfind, is connected with several other localities, but


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GOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 27for ages past it has been best known in connectionwith this village.The name of the place should be observed

Gotham is Gote-ham (not Go-tham), and is some-times written thus in old times, and also Gottam.In the oldest documents we find its Saxon forms,Gat-ham, a goat-home, or Gata-ham, home of goats.In one of the old chap-books of the Tales a woodcutof a man riding upon a goat adorns the title-page.It is quite possible that the custom of calling aperson derisively a goat comes from the traditionalcharacter of the men of Gotham, and that the similaruse of the term cuckoo comes from this Gothamstory.The villagers are by no means ashamed of the

story ; for one of their two hostelries bears, and hasborne from old times, the sign of the Cuckoo Bush,its front adorned with a picture of the bird perched onthe foliage of a tree while some labourers are plant-ing a hedge round it and others carry more boughstowards it and one in the foreground lops a boughfrom another tree with his axe. On the back of thesign-board the bird is the central figure, seated onher branch, with her beak wide open to utter thefamiliar cry. Sketches of this sign-board are givenin Mr. Stapleton's volume.Court Hill is a ridge of high ground rising steeply

to a conspicuous eminence about half a mile southof the village of Gotham. From it there is a verywide view across the valley, and at the foot of it aregypsum mines which provide the principal occupa-


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28 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOtion of the villagers and which in former days sup-plied the material for the plaster floors and ceilingsof Nottingham and the neighbourhood. On thesummit of this hill is Cuckoo Bush Field, with aplantation of trees and some scattered gorse-bushes,now enclosed as a game-preserve and abounding inrabbits. The particular point to which the designa-tion of Cuckoo Bush properly belongs is in thesouth-east angle of the spinney. It is a low butwell-marked tumulus, raised upon the crown of thehill and surrounded by a shallow trench, the spaceenclosed being more than twenty yards across.Running ivy spreads over it, and there are a fewstraggling treesan oak, a beech and a sycamorewith a tall ash-tree standing on the centre. It is inan angle of two ancient tracks, one of which runsalong the ridge of the hill, and the other crossingthe hill carries on the direct line of the high roadwhich runs southward from Nottingham and whichnow has only a diverging course south-eastwardfrom Gotham. The ash-tree on the tumulus isknown as the Cuckoo Bush, and allusions to it arefound at least as far back as the early years of theseventeenth century. It is said that the existingtree was planted about half a century ago in placeof another which had been killed by the thousandsof names scored upon its bark. But in former timesthere was a group of trees upon the mound. Itseems sufficiently evident that the mound was abarrow beneath which some hero of old time wasburied, though it has been thought that possibly it


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GOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 29had some military purpose; and Mr. Stapletonrecords the interesting fact that the villager whotold him the story spoke of the Cuckoo not as beingfenced in with a hedge, as it is commonly told, butas being banked with a circular mound of earth.Upon the same ridge of hill, and a quarter of a

mile along the old track-way to the east of theCuckoo Bush, are the remains of an entrenchmentknown as Crow Wood Mot. This mot is explainedby a tradition, preserved by Thoroton the historianof Nottinghamshire, that the Saxon moot or court ofthe Hundred was held here ; whence also the hill getsits name of Court Hill. Something must be saidhereafter about the word crow ; for it occurs fre-quently in the names of places of primitive impor-tance. And again a little further east and at the footof the ridge there is yet another interesting earth-work. The villagers have a tradition that it was thesite of RushclifFe Hall, and that the family of St.Andrew, who were the owners of Gotham, had amanor house here. In Domesday Book it is Rise-cliff, which in plain English is Hill-cliff ; and itsancient importance is shown by the fact that it givesits name to the wapentake of Rushcliff, one of thesix into which the county of Nottingham is divided.Mr. Stapleton compares the village of Thurgarton,giving its name to another of the wapentakes of thecounty, and having a hill adjoining the Priory calledCastle Hill, which is pronounced to be the site of aBritish or Roman camp and was afterwards themeeting-place of the folk-moot. This so-called site


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30 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOof RushclifF Hall is a rectangular enclosure of abouta hundred yards in length by fifty in breadth, pro-tected by a large and fairly perfect moat more thantwenty feet wide. Part of the moat is still suppliedwith water from springs in the hillside above it.From the fact that the area shows no traces offoundations it is inferred that whatever buildingonce stood upon it must have been of timber only.It lies in a hollow of the hill-front, but the treeswhich formerly shaded it are cut down. It appearstherefore that Risecliff and Court Hill are only twonames of the same eminence of which a portion hascome to be known more commonly as Cuckoo BushHill. Here are the trenches of a prehistoric castle above, and a moat below representing a manor houseof Norman days ; and here the court or folk-moot ofthe wapentake had its meeting-place. Golf-linkshave intruded themselves but have not materiallyaffected the site.The springs which the moat guarded were evi-

dently important in early times ; for the part of thehill where they rise is known as Welldon, the well-dune, or hill of the springs. The villagers seem tohave used them from time immemorial, because thewater of the valley was fouled by the gypsum andthe decayed vegetation of the soil. Throsby, in hisAdditions to Thoroton's History of Nottinghamshire,in 1790, relates that he saw asses, women andchildren, loaded with water, which they werecarrying home across the marshy meadow-land.Under the Enclosure Award of 1804 the spring was


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GOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 31vested in the surveyor of highways, a footway wasconstructed between it and the village, and it was pro-tected by an enclosing wall : afterwards pipes werelaid for the conveyance of the water ; and finally, in1862, Earl Howe erected in the village a small brickbuilding which is known as the Water House.The traditional account of the origin of the stories

is given by Throsby. It explains that King Johnwas proposing to cross the broad|meadows near thisvillage on his way to Nottingham, but the inhabi-tants prevented him, in the belief that the way bywhich a King passed would become a public roadthenceforward : whereupon the King sent someservants to inquire the reason of their incivility,with a view to imposing upon them some fine orother punishment. The villagers, hearing of theapproach of the King's servants, thought of anexpedient to turn away His Majesty'sjdispleasurefrom them. When the messengers arrived atGotham, they found some of the inhabitants en-gaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a poolof water; some were employed in dragging cartsupon a large bam to shade the wood from the sunothers were tumbling their cheeses down a hill,that they might find the way to Nottingham forsale ; and some were employed in hedging in acuckoo, which had perched upon an old bush wherethe present one now stands ; in short, they were allemployed in some foolish way or other, whichconvinced the King's servants that it was a villageof fools.


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32 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOThere is nothing in the chap-book series of stories

to connect them with the visit of a King; but thetradition is illustrated by the Elizabethan play, AKnack to know a Knave, to which allusion has alreadybeen made. It has a scene of grotesque buffooneryintroducing mad men of Goteham, to wit a miller,a cobbler, and a smith, the first of whom proposes, Let us consult among ourselves how to misbehaveourselves to the King's worship, . . . and when hecomes, to deliver him this petition. Presently theKing enters, and the cobbler comes forward asspokesman

We, the townsmen of Goteham,Hearing your grace would come this way,Did think it good for you to stay,(But hear you, neighbours bid somebody ring the bells,)And we come to you aloneTo deliver our petition.

The King asks his attendant what the petition is,and bids him read. The attendant replies, Nothingbut to have a licence to brew strong ale thrice aweek ; and he that comes to Goteham and will notspend a penny on a pot of ale, if he be a-dry, that hemay fast. Whereupon the King replies, Well,sirs, we grant your petition ; and the cobbler, Wehumbly thank your royal majesty. The author ofthe play, therefore, seems to have been familiar withsuch a story as Throsby has recorded of the Kingcoming to Gotham and the misbehaviour of thevillage notables.The spot on which King John was stopped by

three farmers of Gotham is still pointed out near a


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GOTHAM IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 33footpath which leads to the village from the east. Itis marked by a mound which is now ploughed overand has almost disappeared; and this, they say, wasthrown up to obstruct the King's progress. Accord-ing to one account they chained the King and hischariot to a strong post which they planted in thecentre of the mound. In another account the Kinghad condemned the three farmers to be hangedbefore he found that they were merely fools. Butthe main points of the story are, first, that thevillagers resisted the King's approach, and secondly,that he did not deem them worthy of punishment.

It is natural that King John should be the hero ofthe story, on account of his close connection withNottingham. Before his accession, when he wasattempting to usurp the throne during Cceur deLion's absence in the East, his partisans fortifiedNottingham Castle on his behalf; and after he becameKing this place was assaulted by the confederatebarons who invited the Dauphin of France to de-throne him. He was probably the King who wasbest known in the traditions of the neighbouringvillages. Hence the legend of any King either beforehim or after him may well have been handed downas a legend of King John.Various suggested explanations of the story have

been collected by Mr. Stapleton. It is said thatKing John was probably at Gotham in 1206, whenhe passed through Nottingham to Oakham ; for thehigh road southward took this direction fromNottingham as late as the beginning of the eighteenth

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34 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOcentury. One story is that he was intending topurchase a castle and lands at Gotham, and thepeople dreaded having so expensive a neighbour.Henry VH. is said to have encamped near the placein 1487 on his way to Stoke Field, near Newark,where he defeated the insurgent Earl of Lincoln whowas espousing the cause of Lambert Simnel ; andthe memory of some slight offered to the King bypartisans of the impostor may have been confusedwith memories of King John. Henry VHL, too, issaid to have issued a commission to the magistratesof Gotham to prevent poaching, and this may havebeen treated as a subject of ridicule with a similarconfusion of names.Thomas Hearne, the Berkshire antiquary, believedthat the entire series of the Gotham Tales arose from

some obsolete legal tenures in the district, wherelands were held by customs somewhat similar tothose which the tales represent. Mr. Stapletoninclines to the belief that the tales were intended toridicule the proceedings of the Hundred Court ofRushcliffe, more especially as they confine theirridicule to the men and say nothing of the women.But going back behind all these theories, we may

keep in mind the features of special interest whichare still in existence at Gotham. These are, first,the prehistoric tumulus on the crown of the neigh-bouring hill where the villagers say that their fore-fathers hedged in or embanked the cuckoo; secondly,the entrenchment known as Crow Wood Mot ; andthirdly, the quadrangular earthwork beside the


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CHAPTER IVGOTHAM IN SUSSEX

There is a second Gotham, a manor in the parish ofHailsham in Sussex; near to which, also, in theparish of Westham adjoining Pevensey, is someland known as Gotham Marsh. We are assured inLower's Chronicles of Pevensey that several of theGotham Tales are identical with those which are stilltraditionally preserved in the vicinity of Pevensey.Hence it has been suggested that the tales of thechap-book may have belonged to the Sussex Gothamin their origin and may have been adapted by thecompiler to suit the Gotham near Nottingham.Moreover, the tale which speaks of the inhabitantshaving an abundant supply of herrings and spratshas been thought to fit a place near the sea ratherthan a remote inland village ; though at Nottinghamitself the Borough records show that four hundredyears ago the mayor was required to make dueserche within the town in the week afore Lenton... for whyte heryng, red heryng, salt fyshe, etc.What is more to the point is an ancient custom,which is said to have prevailed at Pevensey, of put-ting criminals to death by drowning ; and thus thestory of the murderous eel and his punishment

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GOTHAM IN SUSSEX 37acquires a special meaning at that place. But thestory, as we shall see, is told of other places. It isnoted also that the mayor of Pevensey was a personwho figured prominently in the tales of that boroughfor it was he that told a messenger to keep his haton, for though I am mayor of Pemsey, I am stillbut a man, and when another messenger found himthatching his pigstye and told him that he was read-ing upside-down the missive which was deliveredto him, he bade the man hold his tongue, for whileI am mayor of Pemsey I will hold a letter whicheend uppards I like; and again it was he thatreceived a royal proclamation against the illegalfiring of beacons and at once apprehended a womanwhom he found frying bacon ; and he, with thewhole municipal body of Pevensey, when a manwas condemned to death for stealing a pair of leathernbreeches, recommended that the verdict should bealtered to manslaughter. But the mayor in theGotham Tale whose authority was invoked by theowner of the trevet may have been either ofPevensey or of Nottingham.

It should be observed that Dr. Andrew Borde, towhom the authorship of the Tales has usually beenattributed, was born, as he himself tells us, at BoordsHill in Holms dayle, near Cuckfield ; and there isreason to believe that he made his home at Pevensey,at no great distance from his birthplace, for it is atleast certain that he had property there, since hebequeathed two houses at Pevensey in his will ; andhe is said to have been buried there.


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38 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOThe occasion which is supposed to have led

Dr. Borde to write the Tales is related in Horsfield'sHistory of Lewes. A commission was issued byKing Henry VHI. in 1533 to John prior of Lewes,Richard abbot of Bayham, John prior of Michelham,Thomas lord Dacre, and others ; and they met atWestham on the 3rd of October in that year, for thepurpose of preventing unauthorised persons fromtaking fish within the privileges of the marsh ofPevensey. It is believed that the measure was un-popular and that the Gotham Tales were written topour ridicule upon it, Gotham being the property ofLord Dacre and near his residence. According tothis account the dignitaries who would enforce thelaw were the wise men who thought to drown aneel as a criminal because they believed him to havedevoured the fish that surrounded him.Andrew Borde is undoubtedly the A. B. of

Physicke Doctor to whom the title-page of theearliest existing edition, and of others that followedit, ascribes the Tales ; and they are expressly attri-buted to him in the Athenoe Oxonienses of Anthonya Wood. It will be worth while, before proceedingfurther, to add a short notice of Andrew Borde, forfew persons ever had either a more eccentric charac-ter or a stranger history. He united in himself thediverse characteristics of an austere ascetic, alearned physician, and a facetious mountebank. Ata very early age,younger in fact, than the rules ofthe Order allowed,he became a Carthusian monkat the London Charterhouse, continuing in that life


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GOTHAM IN SUSSEX 3930]ne twenty years. It is the strictest of all Ordersand at a later date we find him writing to the priorof another Carthusian house that he is nott able tobyd therugurositeoffyourrelygyon. He tells us alsothat he was dispensyd with the relygyon by thebyshopp ofRomes bulles, being appointed suffraganbishop in the diocese of Chichester; but he neverentered upon the duties of the office, and it does notappear that he ever received consecration. Perhapsthe vegetarianism of the Order was his particularstumbling block, for he still persevered in a life ofcelibacy and severe fasting, wearing a hair-shirt byday and hanging a winding-sheet beside his bedat night. He obtained his degree in medicine atOxford and studied also in foreign schools. He wasvery successful in his treatment of diseases, and issaid to have been appointed physician to the King.But he also sold his medicines publicly in fairs andmarkets, puffing them with ludicrous harangues,whence he became known as Merry Andrew.Many writers have spoken of him as the originalfrom whom this name became proverbial, but thisappears to be more than doubtful. His love otjoking was so strong that he could not refrain fromplaying upon his own name, which he latinised asAndreas Parforatus,Andrew Perforated, or Bored.Eventually he was incarcerated, for some unknownreason, in the Fleet Prison, where, after only a fewweeks, he died in 1549. We have a quaint andcharacteristic illustration of his humour in The FirstBoke of the Introduction of Knowledge, which he


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40 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOdedicated in 1542 to the Princess Mary. The firstchapter, which treateth of the natural dispositionof an English man, is headed by the picture of anaked man with a piece of cloath lying on his rightarm and a pair of scissors in his left hand, with theverses,

I am an Englishman and naked I stand here,Musing in my mind, what rayment I shall were.

Anthony a Wood, quoting this, adds that his Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, printedin the time ofKing Henry VHL, was then accounteda Book full of wit and mirth by Scholars and Gentle-men. Afterwards, being often printed, is now soldonly on the stalls of Ballad-singers.

Borde's authorship of the Tales has however beenquestioned by eminent authorities, and it has beenthought more likely that the compilation was madeby some hack-writer, probably in London, whomthe publisher employed, and that the well-knowninitials of Andrew Borde were added on the title-page to promote the sale of the book ; just as anotherpopular compilation, known as the Jests of Scogin,was attributed to him, though it is certain that hewas not the author of it. The only other person,however, to whom the Gotham Tales have beenattributed is Lucas de Heere, a Flemish painter whoresided in England in the time of Elizabeth and whois named as the author by Walpole. And thoughthere is no direct evidence to show that they wereBorde's work, there are coincidences which fit inwith the early account that ascribes them to him


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GOTHAM IN SUSSEX 41for Lord Dacre's manor of Gotham close to his homemay well have suggested the name to him, especiallyif he had such a reason as has been assigned forridiculing a meeting that was held there; and wehave sufficient ground for believing that he knewthe other Gotham, with which tales like these hadbeen associated at least a century before his day,for he was a great traveller, and we learn from hisPeregrination that in Notinghamshire he visited Notingham, Maunsfeld, Newerk uponTrent, Blithe,Warsop, Ratfoorth, Bawtree.But it is hardly necessary to ask the question

which of the two Gothams has a prior right to claimthese Tales as its own. It is impossible to agreewith those who have argued that the Tales properlyand originally belong to Sussex and were transferredto the more northern Gotham by the compiler ofthe chap-book ; for there is no doubt that the Not-tinghamshire village bore from time immemorial thecharacter which is here assigned to it. On the otherhand, the coincidence can hardly be accidental whenwe find a second Gotham near the birthplace of thealleged compiler and in a district which possessedsimilar stories. It is probably an example of a con-troversy in which both sides are right. If bothPevensey and the Nottinghamshire village are amongthe places to which tales of this kind belonged, andin particular if each of them was one of the numerousplaces where, as we shall see, the people werecredited with having penned the cuckoo, it is verypossible that both Gothams were in the compiler's


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42 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOmind and that he took stories which were told of theone place and made them serve for the other place.The present name of Peofens-ea, the isle ofPeofen, comes from some hero of Saxon days ; and

the place is made famous in history by the landingof William the Conqueror ; for in those days it wason the sea-shore, though a mile's breadth of pasture-land has now been silted up on the south of it. Fromit the Conqueror led his Normans forward to theirgreat victory over Harold at Senlac on the neigh-bouring hills. But the spot has an older record asthe Anderida of the Roman occupation. It gave itsname to the great forest of the Andredsweald whichspread northward from the sea-coast almost to theThames and measured more than a hundred milesfrom east to west. When the first Saxon invadershad for nearly thirty years been pushing theirconquest up the Thames, of which the story mustbe told in a later chapter, the chieftain .^lla in 477landed a new force on the coast of Sussex ; manyBritons fell; but many escaped into the Andreds-weald ; and fourteen years passed before JEWa couldaccomplish the fall of Andredceaster.Of the long and obstinate resistance made by its

British defenders, and of the fierce determination oftheir assailants, a very full account has been givenby Henry of Huntingdon who wrote his Histories ofthe English in the twelfth century, and his graphicstory is worth transcribing. Ella, relying uponhis vast forces, besieged the strongly fortified cityof Andredecester : whereupon the Britons flocked


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GOTHAM IN SUSSEX 43together like bees and defeated the besiegers withstratagems by day and with attacks by night. Therewas not a day nor a night in which the minds of theSaxons were not exasperated by new and ill-omenedtidings ; but these only made them fiercer, and theybeset the city with incessant assaults. Yet alwaysas they assailed it the Britons pressed upon them inthe rear with their archers and with javelins thrownwith thongs. Therefore the Pagans left their wallsand directed their steps and their arms against them.Then the Britons excelling them in swiftness ranand sought the woods and came upon them frombehind when they returned towards the walls again.By this device the Saxons were harrassed a longtime and there was an immense slaughter of them,until they divided their army into two parts, so thatwhile one part was storming the city there might beon their rear a line of fighting men drawn up tooppose the assaults of the Britons. And then thecitizens, worn out with long want of food, whenthey could no longer endure the pressure of theirassailants, were all devoured by the sword, with thewomen and children, so that not even one escaped.And the foreigners, because they had suffered suchlosses there, destroyed the city so utterly that itwas never afterwards rebuilt. To those who passby it the site alone as of a very noble city is pointedout in its desolation.An irregular oval enclosure of some nine acres is

still surrounded by the remains of massive Romanwalls, in which several of the buttress-towers are


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44 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOstanding, though several others have fallen andlarge parts of the walls have slipped down into theboggy marshland. In the south-east angle of theenclosure are the ruins of the Norman castle foundedby Robert Earl of Mortaigne who was half-brotherto ^yilliam the Conqueror.The very important part which Pevensey thus

played in the great struggle of the Britons againsttheir invaders is of considerable interest in connec-tion with the probable origin of the cuckoo myth.When Merry Andrew gathered, as his title-pagesays, the materials ofhis stories from various sources,he may have met with this one in his native place,or at the other Gotham, or at both. At any rate theexistence of Gotham stories at Pevensey givesadditional reason for thinking that they sprang outof the feud between the Briton and the Saxon.


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CHAPTER VTHE CUCKOO-PENNERS

It almost goes without saying that where the peopleofany place become the butt of their neighbours' wit,and are credited with abnormal folly such as isattributed to the people of Gotham, a difference ofrace is at the foundation of such ridicule. ThePhrygians, hemmed in among their mountains in thecentral district of Asia Minor and sprung from anolder stock than the immigrants who surroundedthem, were accounted the most stupid of the Asiatics.The Boeotians, an ancient tribe who lived in a hollowamong the hills on the confines of Attica, weredespised by the Athenians as the fools of Greece, sothat when Horace describes a dullard it is one ofwhom you may swear that he was born in thefoggy air of the Boeotians. And the same characterwas borne, perhaps most notoriously of all, byAbdera on the coast of Thrace, a town that wasoccupied by an Ionian colony driven from theopposite coast by the advance of Cyrus and neverable to assimilate with its Thracian neighbours, sothat Juvenal' could call it the the father-land ofmutton-heads, and when Cicero would ridicule the

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46 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOstupidity of the Roman senators he stigmatised theircity as an Abdera.The Germans have their proverbial fools in thepeople of Schildburg, and a number of traditional

stories similar to the Tales of the Wise Men ofGotham was collected and published in the latterpart of the sixteenth century under the title of TheHistory of the Schildburghers, which has been aspopular in Germany as the corresponding book hasbeen in England. The Schildburghers, we are told,were descended from one of the famous Wise Menof Greece, and were reckoned so extraordinarilywise that the kings of all the various nations invitedthem to take part in their councils, until at last theirown home affairs became so neglected and theirwives so disconsolate that they were driven to feignthemselves fools in their desire to be allowed toremain at home in peace; and they received adocument, signed and sealed by the Emperor,according to them the privilege of perform-ing every possible act of folly. These boors ofSchilda built themselves a council-house with nowindows, and looked all round it to discover why itwas dark ; then, holding a council, each one with atorch fixed upon his hat, they decided to carry somedaylight in, and filled boxes, baskets and tubs withsunbeams, which they tried to empty into the room :when this failed, they decided to take their roofaway, and that plan was successful for the summer,but when the winter came they were forced to re-place the roof and have torches in their hats again


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THE CUCKOO-PENNERS 47till one day light fell through a crevice on acouncillor's beard, and they bethought them of awindow. They built a mill and quarried a hugemillstone for it in a neighbouring mountain-top, andcarried it down with infinite labour ; then, recollect-ing that it might more easily have been rolled down,they carried it up again ; but they must be sure ofnot losing sight of it in its descent, therefore one ofthem got into the hole in the middle of it ; but itrolled into a pond, stone and man alike were lost,and they supposed he had carried it off and sold itwhereupon they published a notice in the neighbour-ing towns, enquiring for a man with a millstoneround his neck. Their final achievement was toturn themselves out of house and home; and likethe Jews they became wanderers throughout theworld, so that there is no country where theirdescendants may not be found. Even if the storyhad not implied that the Schildburghers wereforeigners by assigning them a Greek origin, itwould be easy to infer that they were people of anolder stock who were retained by their conquerors,like the Chaldeans in Babylon, as useful men whoknew the secrets of the land ; but the newer racewere eager to be rid of them at last, and thus theybecame wandering outcasts.The joke of charging the inhabitants of a place or

district with having pent up the cuckoo is to be metwith in various parts of the country as well as atGotham. It is best known as a Somersetshire story.The wise men of that county, says a writer in Notes


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48 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOand Queries, took an unfledged cuckoo and built ahigh wall to imprison it ; there they fed it ; and thelittle bird grubbed on quietly till its wings weregrown, and then it flew away : they had forgottenthat it would learn to fly, and therefore they hadnot thought of roofing the enclosure.More particularly, the people of Somerset are

ridiculed as the Cuckoo-Penners by their neigh-bours in Wiltshire, and they retaliate upon theWiltshire folk as the Moonrakers. One of thetales already noticed as told of the men of Gotham,though not included in the chap-book collection, isthis joke of raking out the moon from the villagehorse pond under the delusion that it was a cheese.It appears that although the whole county gets thecredit of the action, the story belonged originally toparticular places in it. Pewsey is one of these.More especially the people of Bishops Canningsnear Devizes are prominent as moonrakers, andother tales of the Gotham class are told of them.Indeed it seems that they have kept up theircharacter as the naturals of the district untilquite recent times ; for it is on record that when thecomet of 1847 appeared in the sky the whole villageset off over the hills towards the Vies, as the nearneighbours call Devizes, to get a closer view of it.Wiltshire men were clever enough, however, tomake good use of their moonraking fame on oneoccasion in the smuggling days when some of themhad helped to run into a Dorset cove a cargo ofspirit which had paid no dues to the King; for after


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THE CUCKOO-PENNERS 49they had conveyed their share of the booty intotheir own county, to replenish the cupboards of theneighbouring farms, the Preventive men pursuedthem, only to find that the smugglers were a partyof country yokels raking a pool of water in themoonlight, and protesting, as they pointed to thereflection of the moon, that they were trying to getthat cheese ; whereupon they were let alone as hope-less idiots, and the rakes brought back the sunkenkegs of spirits. Wiltshire men would fain claimthis incident as the origin of the story, and accord-ingly they glory in their soubriquet. Thus theSwindon Football Club calls itself the Moonrakers ;and quite recently the newspapers told of sometwenty of them coming to London to see a matchbetweeen two leading clubs on the Tottenhamground and causing much merriment as they passedalong the streets in the smocks and hats of hay-carters, with their banner of the moon and thecrossed hay-rakes displayed aloft. Similarly, a lead-ing cricket club in Somersetshire has decorated itselfwith the proud title of the Cuckoo-Penners. Andit may fairly be presumed that here also, as in Wilt-shire, the story belonged to some particular placeor places before it became the property of thecounty.Both the Wiltssetas and the Somersaetas, it

should be remembered, brought their names tothese two counties when they were merely set-tlers among the Britons. They had migratedthither out of the kingdom of Wessex when that

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so THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOkingdom extended no farther westward than thelands which are now Hampshire and Berkshire.The district of the Wiltsaetas was not annexed bythe men of Wessex until 556, when, as the Chroniclerelates, Cynric and Ceawlin defeated the Britons atBeran-byrig, the hill fort of Barbury on the Wilt-shire Downs. The district of the Somerssetas layoutside the Saxon realm till another century hadpassed ; for it was not until 658, according to theChronicle, that Cenwalh won a part of the lands ofthe Somersaetas by his victory at Peonna or Pen,whether this were Pen Selwood or Pen Hill inMendip or Pen on Brent Knoll,and he drovethe Welshmen as far as Pedrida, or Petherton, andmade the River Parret his boundary ; and it was notuntil 710 that Ina, a later descendant of Cerdic,brought all the Somersaetas' lands into his kingdomby the defeat of the British King Geraint. Thehistory leads us to expect that while survivingremnants of the British race were but small in thedistricts of the Saxon's earliest conquests theywould certainly be more numerous in Wiltshireand more numerous still in Somerset. We mayreasonably conclude that both the original moon-rakers of the one county and the original cuckoo-penners of the other belonged to that Britishsurvival.There is, however, one place in Wiltshire where

the people are said to have pent the cuckoo. Thesouthern boundary of the county crosses the riverAvon about twenty miles above its mouth. The


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THE CUCKOO-PENNERS 51southernmost village on the Wiltshire side isDownton, and the northernmost village on theHampshire side is Charford. At Downton, withinprivate grounds on the south of the village, is aBritish entrenchment of horse-shoe form openingout on the river and protected by outer banks andditches behind. Trees have been planted andwalks have been laid out upon it in modern times,but ^^orm is still plainly to be seen. At each endof the inner bank is a lofty mound. On the northernmound, known as Execution Hill, criminals havebeen put to death within the times that local tradi-tion has not forgotten. The southern mound,seventy feet high, is Moot Hill. A descriptivesketch of it, compiled by the Rev. Arthur du BotriayHill, sometime vicar of Downton, tells us that theslope towards the river is carved into six largesteps or terraces, rising one above the other from alevel plat below. The space between this and theriver, naturally marshy, has now been laid out as alarge fish pond. This remarkable terraced moundis probably a unique instance of a Saxon open-aircourt constructed within an older British earth-work. Downton gives its name to the Hundred,and doubtless the Hundred-moot as well as theTown-moot was held at Moot Hill.

Cerdic and Cynric his son, two aldermen of theAngles, came in 495 with five ships to Cerdics-ore,which was doubtless the shore of the Solent or ofSouthampton Water, and they fought the Britonsthere. Twenty-five years later they obtained the


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S2 THE MYTH OF THE PENT CUCKOOkingdom of the West Saxe, as the Chronicle relates,and their descendants reigned thenceforward. Inthat year, 519, they fought the Britons at Cerdicsford,which is undoubtedly Cheordicsford, now Charford.This was the northern limit of their conquest upthe Avon. They stopped short of the strongfortress of Downton. How long it resisted themwe cannot tell ; but at least it was long enough forthis line to become defined as a permanent boundary,and thirty-seven years passed before Cerdic wonwhat we know as Wiltshire. We may infer there-fore that Downton was a place where a Britishremnant survived, And its people have the reputa-tion of being cuckoo-penners. A village poet ofrecent times has versified the story, and hasattributed to the the Wise Men of Downton allthe tales that belong to Gotham, including theattempt to outwit King John.

Some from a pond the moon essayed to rake,And some an eel were drowning in a lake ;Some on a shed with carts and waggons stoodTo cast a shadow on a neighbouring wood.Here wives were rolling cheeses down a hill,There boys with pack-thread tugging at a mill.Some gates were shutting of a neighbouring field,From winds and draughts the lambs and calves to shield.Here round a bush with idiotic grinA ring was formed to hedge a cuckoo in.

* * # KrAll played their parts, and John for ever after 'Could never think of Downton without laughter.

It is reasonable to infer that the Cuckoo myth wasindigenous here, and that this, coupled with thefact that King John in his recorded journeys paid at


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THE CUCKOO-PENNERS 53least three visits to the place, suggested the additionof the rest of the Gotham story, together with themoonrakers' tale which is

Documents

Cu31924029912734 the Myth of the Pent Cuckoo a Study in Folklore (1913)