More foolery

[wolfinthewood]

Following a query by artnouveauho I became interested in tracking down the earliest references to April Fool’s Day in England. (A nice frivolous little research project at the end of a hard week.)

Right now the honour appears to fall to the anonymous author of S’too him, Bayes, or, Some observations upon the humour of writing Rehearsals transpros’d (1673), a polemical response to Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d: ‘Do’st thou take this to be the first of April when (they say) folks send fools of Errands?’

The parenthesis is interesting: it suggests to me a custom that is known but not universally established.

Just over ten years later Miles Prance refers confidently to ‘the first of April (the day Fools are wont to be sent on Errands)’ (A Postscript to the Observators First Volumn (sic), 1684). Meanwhile the phrase 'April errand' had come into use, with the meaning of foolish or pointless errand; first reference 1681, in Notes upon Stephen College, a polemic by Sir Roger L'Estrange; later occurrences 1687, 1690.

For what is apparently the first use of ‘April Fool’ see Congreve in 1687, quoted in the comments to my last post.

In 1697 the satirist and hack Thomas Brown published a comedy, Physick lies a Bleeding, or the Apothecary turned Doctor, with the subtitle: ‘a Comedy, Acted every Day in most Apothecaries Shops in London. And more especially to be seen by Those who are willing to be cheated, the First of April, every Year’.

In 1699 in A new dictionary of the canting crew (which covers slang as well as canting) the editor, ‘B. E.’, defines ‘Sleeveless-errand’ as ‘such as Fools are sent on, the first of April’.

It’s clear from these last two records that by the end of the seventeenth century the custom of making ‘April fools’ out of people was very well known. The allusion in Brown’s title suggests that by that time, at least, it went beyond the practice of sending the gullible on silly errands, and embraced other ways of fooling them.

It seems that in England fooling and the first of April became associated in the Restoration period. On the Continent it may well have had a longer history, but I don’t have the resources to check that up right now. At a guess I’d say it most likely came over to England with the members of Charles II’s court, returning out of exile.

Update:

Here’s a rather nice discovery. The 1702 edition of the almanac Merlinus Anglicus Junior, by Henry Coley, has under ‘Saints Days’ in April, 1: ‘All Fools Day.’


tags: folk custom

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