The Book of Noodles. W. A. Clouston
Ut prolocutiis sum acquantur bestiis."
It reappears in the Bizarrures of the Sieur Gaulard:2 "Seeing one day his mule charged with a verie great Portmantle, [he] said to his groome that was upon the back of the mule, thou lasie fellowe, hast thou no pitie upon that poore Beast? Take that portmantle upon thine owne shoulders to ease the poore Beast." And in our own time it is told of an Irish exciseman with a keg of smuggled whisky.
How such stories came to be transferred to the men of Gotham, it were fruitless to inquire.3 Similar jests have been long current in other countries of Europe and throughout Asia, and accident or malice may have fixed the stigma of stupidity on any particular spot. There is probably no ground whatever for crediting the tale of the origin of the proverb, "As wise as the men of Gotham," although it is reproduced in Thoroton's Nottinghamshire, i. 42–3:
"King John, intending to pass through this place, towards Nottingham, was prevented by the inhabitants, they apprehending that the ground over which a king passed was for ever after to become a public road. The King, incensed at their proceedings, sent from his court soon afterwards some of his servants to inquire of them the reason of their incivility and ill-treatment, that he might punish them. The villagers, hearing of the approach of the King's servants, thought of an expedient to turn away his Majesty's displeasure from them. When the messengers arrived at Gotham, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn to shade the wood from the sun; and others were engaged in hedging a cuckoo, which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all employed in some foolish way or other, which convinced the King's servants that it was a village of fools."
The fooleries ascribed to the men of Gotham were probably first collected and printed in the sixteenth century; but that jests of the "fools of Gotham" were current among the people long before that period is evident from a reference to them in the Widkirk Miracle Plays, the only existing MS. of which was written about the reign of Henry VI.:
"Foles al sam;
Sagh I never none so fare
Bote the soles of Gotham."
The oldest known copy of the Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam was printed in 1630, and is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Warton, in his History of English Poetry, mentions an edition, which he says was printed about 1568, by Henry Wikes, but he had never seen it. But Mr. Halliwell (now Halliwell-Phillips), in his Notices of Popular English Histories, cites one still earlier, which he thinks was probably printed between 1556 and 1566: "Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam, gathered together by A.B., of Phisike Doctour. [colophon:] Imprinted at London, in Flet-Stret, beneath the Conduit, at the signe of S. John Evangelist, by Thomas Colwell, n.d. 12°, black letter." The book is mentioned in A Briefe and Necessary Introduction, etc., by E.D. (8vo, 1572), among a number of other folk-books: "Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwicke, Arthur of the Round Table, Huon of Bourdeaux, Oliver of the Castle, The Four Sonnes of Amond, The Witles Devices of Gargantua, Howleglas, Esop, Robyn Hoode, Adam Bell, Frier Rushe, The Fooles of Gotham, and a thousand such other."4 And Anthony à Wood, in his Athenæ Oxonienses (1691–2), says it was "printed at London in the time of K. Hen. 8, in whose reign and after it was accounted a book full of wit and mirth by scholars and gentlemen. Afterwards being often printed, [it] is now sold only on the stalls of ballad-singers." It is likely that the estimation in which the book was held "by scholars and gentlemen" was not a little due to the supposition that "A.B., of Phisike Doctour," by whom the tales were said to have been "gathered together," was none other than Andrew Borde, or Boorde, a Carthusian friar before the Reformation, one of the physicians to Henry VIII., a great traveller, even beyond the bounds of Christendom, "a thousand or two and more myles," a man of great learning, withal "of fame facete." For to Borde have the Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham been generally ascribed down to our own times. There is, however, as Dr. F.J. Furnivall justly remarks, "no good external evidence that the book was written by Borde, while the internal evidence is against his authorship."5 In short, the ascription of its compilation to "A.B., of Phisike Doctour," was clearly a device of the printer to sell the book.6
The Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham continued to be printed as a chap-book down to the close of the first quarter of the present century; and much harmless mirth they must have caused at cottage firesides in remote rural districts occasionally visited by the ubiquitous pedlar, in whose well-filled pack of all kinds of petty merchandise such drolleries were sure to be found. Unlike other old collections of facetiæ, the little work is remarkably free from objectionable stories; some are certainly not very brilliant, having, indeed, nothing in them particularly "Gothamite," and one or two seem to have been adapted from the Italian novelists. Of the twenty tales comprised in the collection, the first is certainly one of the most humorous:
There were two men of Gotham, and one of them was going to the market at Nottingham to buy sheep, and the other was coming from the market, and both met on Nottingham bridge. "Well met!" said the one to the other. "Whither are you a-going?" said he that came from Nottingham. "Marry," said he that was going thither, "I am going to the market to buy sheep." "Buy sheep!" said the other. "And which way will you bring them home?" "Marry," said the other, "I will bring them over this bridge." "By Robin Hood," said he that came from Nottingham, "but thou shalt not." "By Maid Marian," said he that was going thither, "but I will." "Thou shalt not," said the one. "I will," said the other. Then they beat their staves against the ground, one against the other, as if there had been a hundred sheep betwixt them. "Hold them there," said the one. "Beware of the leaping over the bridge of my sheep," said the other. "They shall all come this way," said one. "But they shall not," said the other. And as they were in contention, another wise man that belonged to Gotham came from the market, with a sack of meal upon his horse; and seeing and hearing his neighbours at strife about sheep, and none betwixt them, said he, "Ah, fools, will you never learn wit? Then help me," said he that had the meal, "and lay this sack upon my shoulder." They did so, and he went to the one side of the bridge and unloosed the mouth of the sack, and did shake out all the meal into the river. Then said he, "How much meal is there in the sack, neighbours?" "Marry," answered they, "none." "Now, by my faith," answered this wise man, "even so much wit is there in your two heads to strive for the thing which you have not." Now which was the wisest of these three persons, I leave you to judge.
Allusions to these tales are of frequent occurrence in our literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dekker, in his Gul's Horn Book (1609), says, "It is now high time for me to have a blow at thy head, which I will not cut off with sharp documents, but rather set it on faster, bestowing upon it such excellent serving that if all the wise men of Gotham should lay their heads together, their jobbernowls should not be able to compare with thine;" and Wither, in his Abuses, says,
"And he that tryes to doe it might have bin
One of the crew that hedged the cuckoo in,"
alluding to one of the most famous exploits of the wittols:
On a time the men of Gotham would have pinned in the cuckoo, whereby she should sing all the year, and in the midst of the town they made a hedge round in compass, and they had got a cuckoo, and had put her into it, and said, "Sing here all the year, and thou shalt lack neither meat nor drink." The cuckoo, as soon as she perceived herself encompassed within the hedge, flew away. "A vengeance on her!" said they. "We made not our hedge high enough."
The tales had, however, attained popular favour much earlier. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has pointed out that in Philotimus (1583) the men of Gotham are remembered