Accordingly, when the messengers arrived, they found the villagers engaged in all manner of fantastic employments. Some were endeavouring to drown an eel; others were occupied in dragging carts on to the roof of a barn, to shade the wood from the sun; yet others were tumbling their cheeses downhill, to find their way to Nottingham market; and some were busily engaged in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all busy in some foolish way or another; and their folly was duly reported to the King; who, however, shrewdly remarked that “we ween there be more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.”
The folly of the Gothamites, according to this version, was more apparent than real; but it is the name for folly, rather than that for cunning, which has survived. So early as 1568 appeared the book entitled “The Merry Tales of the Mad-men of Gottam,” and other ancient allusions are plentiful; among them that to “Gotham College,” an imaginary institution for the training of simpletons. A rhyme, of unknown antiquity, celebrates another exploit of the villagers, in a delicately allusive way:
Three Wise Men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl;
If the bowl had been stronger,
My tale had been longer.
The tragedy of the voyage we can vividly picture for ourselves.
There is, however, a rival Gotham, disputing these doubtful honours. It is a place called Gotham Marsh, situated in the neighbourhood of Pevensey, and the identical tales are told of it; but if any place may be said to be the real original, the Nottinghamshire village is the one, although it must not be forgotten that many places are credited with similar stupidity. Of the village of Towednack, in Cornwall, in the neighbourhood of St. Ives, the identical cuckoo story is told; the people of Coggeshall, in Essex, are said to have chained up a wheelbarrow, after it was bitten by a mad dog, for fear it should develop hydrophobia; and in the ancient world Bœotia and Phrygia were notoriously considered the home of the dunderheaded. We are familiar, too, with the taunt in the Scriptures, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?”
GOTHAM.