“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 deg., 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 a Wood, in his Athenae 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.,