The Cuckoo Wood

A muddy, misty afternoon in Nottinghamshire. Slogging along a field path somewhere near Gotham and East Leake, I was charmed to come across a signboard telling me that a little patch of woodland in the middle of the fields was known as the Cuckoo Wood and that inside it there was a tumulus, which was supposed to be the remains of the place where the people of Gotham had once built a pen to keep in the cuckoo.

I first read the stories about the ‘fools of Gotham’ when I was a child. It never dawned on me in those days that Gotham, the village famous for its heroically stupid inhabitants, was a real place. I was somewhat intrigued when I came to live in the Midlands and discovered that Gotham was the name of a local village. And stumbling across the actual place where they were supposed to have penned in the cuckoo was sheer delight.

The story goes back at least to Tudor times (it may be older). The earliest printed version is given below. It is a bit different from the local version, since the Cuckoo Wood is well outside the village.

A similar story is told in the Lake District, about the people of Borrowdale, who were supposed to have tried to block the entrance to their narrow valley with a wall to keep the cuckoo from flying out. (See Marjorie Rowling, The Folklore of the Lake District, Batsford, 1976, p. 107)

The reason for doing this, not explained in the version of the Gotham story below, was to ensure that there would be a perpetual spring – since the cuckoo’s coming traditionally marks the beginning of spring.

***

On a time the men of Gotham would have penned the cuckoo, that she should sing all the year, and in the midst of the town they did make a hedge, round in compass, and they had got a cuckoo, and put her in it and said, “Sing here all the year, and thou shalt lack neither meat nor drink.” The cuckoo, as soon as she was set within the hedge, flew her way. “A vengeance on her!” said they, “we made not our hedge high enough.”

as collected by Andrew Boorde[?] (1490–1549)

in Merie Tales of the mad men of Gotam (1565 edition)

Andrew Boorde, incidentally, was a well-known physician. He may or may not have been the real author of this and other jest-books ascribed to him. The logic of ascribing jest-collections to a physician – or of a physician’s collecting and publishing jokes – was that laughter was believed in Tudor times to be very good for your health. Modern doctors have come to the same conclusion.


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