When an Austwick “carle” comes into any of the larger towns of Yorkshire, it is said he is greeted with the question, “Who tried to lift the bull over the gate?” in allusion to the following story:  An Austwick farmer, wishing to get a bull out of a field—­how the animal got into it, the story does not inform us—­procured the assistance of nine of his neighbours to lift the animal over the gate.  After trying in vain for some hours, they sent one of their number to the village for more help.  In going out he opened the gate, and after he had gone away, it occurred to one of those who remained that the bull might be allowed to go out in the same manner.

Another Austwick farmer had to take a wheelbarrow to a certain town, and, to save a hundred yards by going the ordinary road, he went through the fields, and had to lift the barrow over twenty-two stiles.

It was a Wiltshire man, however (if all tales be true), who determined to cure the filthy habits of his hogs by making them roost upon the branches of a tree, like birds.  Night after night the pigs were hoisted up to their perch, and every morning one of them was found with its neck broken, until at last there were none left.—­And quite as witless, surely, was the device of the men of Belmont, who once desired to move their church three yards farther westward, so they carefully marked the exact distance by leaving their coats on the ground.  Then they set to work to push with all their might against the eastern wall.  In the meantime a thief had gone round to the west side and stolen their coats.  “Diable!” exclaimed they on finding that their coats were gone, “we have pushed too far!”

[Illustration] [Illustration]

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Coffee House Jests.  Fifth edition.  London. 1688.  P. 36.

[2] “See ante, p. 8, note.” [Transcriber’s note:  This is Chapter I, Footnote 1 in this etext.]

[3] Fuller, while admitting that “an hundred fopperies are forged and fathered on the townsfolk of Gotham,” maintains that “Gotham doth breed as wise people as any which laugh at their simplicity.”

[4] Collier’s Bibliographical Account, etc., vol. i., p. 327.

[5] Forewords to Borde’s Introduction of Knowledge, etc., edited, for the Early English Text Society, by F.J.  Furnivall.

[6] It is equally certain that Borde had no hand either in the Jests of Scogin or The Mylner of Abyngton, the latter an imitation of Chaucer’s Reve’s Tale.

[7] Powell and Magnusson’s Legends of Iceland, Second Series.

[8] An imitation of Boccaccio, Decameron, Day vii., nov. 8, who perhaps borrowed the story from Guerin’s fabliau “De la Dame qui fit accroire a son Mari qu’il avait reve; alias, Les Cheveux Coupes” (Le Grand’s Fabliaux, ed. 1781, tome ii., 280).