[15:4] Naught venture naught have.—Tusser: Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. October Abstract.
[15:5] 'T is an old saw, Children and fooles speake true.—Lyly: Endymion.
[15:6] Set all on sex and seven.—Chaucer: Troilus and Cresseide, book iv. line 623; also Towneley Mysteries.
At six and seven.—Shakespeare: Richard II. act ii. sc. 2.
[15:7] All 's fish they get that cometh to net.—Tusser: Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. February Abstract.
Where all is fish that cometh to net.—Gascoigne: Steele Glas. 1575.
[15:8] Him that makes shoes go barefoot himself.—Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy. Democritus to the Reader.
[15:9] This phrase derives its origin from the custom of certain manors where tenants are authorized to take fire-bote by hook or by crook; that is, so much of the underwood as many be cut with a crook, and so much of the loose timber as may be collected from the boughs by means of a hook. One of the earliest citations of this proverb occurs in John Wycliffe's Controversial Tracts, circa 1370.—See Skelton, page [8]. Rabelais: book v. chap. xiii. Du Bartas: The Map of Man. Spenser: Faerie Queene, book iii. canto i. st. 17. Beaumont and Fletcher: Women Pleased, act. i. sc. 3.