"One coaks'd or cockered, made a wanton or nestle-cock of, delicately bred and brought up, so that when grown men or women they can endure no hardship, nor comport with pains taking."
"'Tis not their fault, but our mothers', our cockering mothers, who for their labour make us to be called Cockneys."—Dekker, A Knight's Conjuring, 1607.
"And when this jape is told another day I shall be halden a daffe or a Cokenay."
Chaucer, The Reve's Tale.
The following extracts will show that to this first sense Fuller might have added, one abundantly and daintily fed:—
"Unlesse it be shortly considered, and that faukons be broughte to a more homelye diete, it is ryght likely, that within a shorte space of yeares, our familiar pultry shall be as scarse, as be now partriche and fesaunte. I speake not this in disprayse of the faukons, but of them whiche keepeth them lyke Cokeneys."—Elyot, The Governour, 1557.
"Some again are in the other extreme, and draw this mischief on their heads by too ceremonious and strict diet, being over precise cockney-like, and curious in their observation of meats."—Burton. Anatomy of Melancholy.
Fuller's second sense is—
"One utterly ignorant of husbandry and huswifery such as is practised in the country, so that he may be easily persuaded anything about rural commodities, and the original thereof."
He relates the old cock-neigh story, and adds another jest of a similar kind: