"One merrily persuaded a she-citizen, that seeing malt did not grow, the good huswives in the country did spin it; 'I knew as much,' said the Cockney, 'for one may see the threads hang out at the ends thereof."
Shakspeare uses the word Cockney in this latter sense in King Lear, Act II. Sc. 4.:
"Lear. Oh me, my heart, my rising heart! But down."
"Fool. Cry to it, nuncle, as the Cockney did to the eels, when she put 'em i' th' paste alive; she knapt 'em o' th' coxcombs with a stick, and cried 'Down, wantons, down;' 'twas her brother, that in pure kindness to his horse buttered his hay."
Cokeney was apparently used in very early times to designate London. In the Britannia, art. "Suffolk," Hugh Bigod, a rebellious baron in the time of Henry II., boasts thus:
"Were I in my castle of Bungey,
Upon the river Waveney,
I would ne care for the King of Cockeney."
I conceive that Cokeney in this sense is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word cycene, a kitchen or cooking place. Nares, however, in his Glossary, says:
"Le pais de cocagne, in French, means a country of good cheer; in old French coquaine; cocagna, in Italian, has the same meaning. Both might be derived from coquina. This famous country, if it could be found, is described as a region 'where the hills were made of sugar-candy, and the loaves ran down the hills, crying 'Come eat me, come eat me.'"