Another story is of a man of Norfolk who put some honey in a jar, and in his absence his dog came and ate it all up.  When he returned home and was told of this, he took the dog and forced him to disgorge the honey, put it back into the jar, and took it to market.  A customer having examined the honey, declared it to be putrid.  “Well,” said the simpleton, “it was in a vessel that was not very clean.”—­Wright has pointed out that this reappears in an English jest-book of the seventeenth century.  “A cleanly woman of Cambridgeshire made a good store of butter, and whilst she went a little way out of the town about some earnest occasions, a neighbour’s dog came in in the meantime, and eat up half the butter.  Being come home, her maid told her what the dog had done, and that she had locked him up in the dairy-house.  So she took the dog and hang’d him up by the heels till she had squeez’d all the butter out of his throat again, whilst she, pretty, cleanly soul, took and put it to the rest of the butter, and made it up for Cambridge market.  But her maid told her she was ashamed to see such a nasty trick done.  ‘Hold your peace, you fool!’ says she; ’’tis good enough for schollards.  Away with it to market!’"[1]—­Perhaps the original form is found in the Philogelos Hieraclis et Philagrii Facetiae, edited by Eberhard.  A citizen of Cumae was selling honey.  Some one came up and tasted it, and said that it was all bad.  He replied, “If a mouse had not fallen into it, I would not sell it.”

The well-known Gothamite jest of the man who put a sack of meal on his own shoulders to save his horse, and then got on the animal’s back and rode home, had been previously told of a man of Norfolk, thus: 

  “Ad foram ambulant diebus singulis;
  Saccum de lolio portant in humeris,
  Jumentis ne noccant:  bene fatuis,
  Ut prolocutiis sum acquantur bestiis.”

It reappears in the Bizarrures of the Sieur Gaulard:[2] “Seeing one day his mule charged with a verie great Portmantle, [he] said to his groome that was upon the back of the mule, thou lasie fellowe, hast thou no pitie upon that poore Beast?  Take that portmantle upon thine owne shoulders to ease the poore Beast.”  And in our own time it is told of an Irish exciseman with a keg of smuggled whisky.

How such stories came to be transferred to the men of Gotham, it were fruitless to inquire.[3] Similar jests have been long current in other countries of Europe and throughout Asia, and accident or malice may have fixed the stigma of stupidity on any particular spot.  There is probably no ground whatever for crediting the tale of the origin of the proverb, “As wise as the men of Gotham,” although it is reproduced in Thoroton’s Nottinghamshire, i. 42-3: