Gotham, TALES OF THE MEN OF, a collection of jests, in which the people of Gotham, a village in Nottinghamshire (7 miles SSW. of Nottingham), are represented as saying and doing the most foolish things. These tales are similar to the Asteia, or facetiae, ascribed, without authority, to the 5th-century Alexandrian philosopher Hierocles. The stories seem to have been first printed about the middle of the 16th century, under the title of Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, gathered together by A. B., of Phisicke Doctor; but they had been orally current in the time of Henry VI., reference being made to 'the foles of Gotam' in the Towneley miracle-plays, the only known MS. of which was written about that period. The initials 'A. B.' of the putative compiler were doubtless intended by the printer to signify Andrew Boorde (q.v.), who was popularly regarded as 'a fellow of infinite jest.' But there is no reason to suppose that Boorde had any hand in the work, his initials being placed on the title-page—as also on that of the Jests of Scogin—in order to promote its sale. Long before the men of Gotham were saddled with the unenviable reputation of being typical block-heads similar jests had been told at the expense of the people of Norfolk, as we learn from a curious Latin poem entitled Descriptio Norfolciensium, written in the 12th century by a monk of Peterborough, which is printed in Wright's Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems. In this 'poem' occurs the familiar jest of the man who was riding on horseback with a sack of meal, and considerably placed the sack on his own shoulders to lighten the horse—a story which reappears in the Gothamite drolleries and in the Bigarrures of the Sieur Gaulard, by Étienne Tabourot (1549-90), and which is at the present day current in Ceylon.
The Gothamite jest most generally known is that of the attempt of the villagers to hedge in a cuckoo, so that it should 'sing' all the year round. Among other witless exploits they tried to drown an eel that had eaten up all the fish in their pond; they fastened their rents on a hare which they had caught, and sent it off to their landlord; a smith burned down his smithy by thrusting into the thatch a red-hot ploughshare, to destroy a wasp's nest; and twelve of them went a-fishing, and before returning home one counted their number to see whether all were safe, but omitted to include himself, whereupon they weened that one of them was drowned, and were lamenting this misfortune, when a traveller coming up, and learning the cause of their distress, soon set their minds at ease. Such jests are—mutatis mutandis—common to almost all the races of mankind, from Iceland to Japan, from Ceylon to the West Highlands of Scotland; and it is curious to find that the inhabitants of some particular district or village are popularly held up as arrant simpletons. In Britain, besides the men of Gotham, the 'carles of Austwick' in Yorkshire, the villagers near Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, the 'gowks of Gordon' in Berwickshire, and the folk of Assynt in Sutherlandshire; in Germany, the Schildburgers; in Holland, the people of Kampen; in Belgium, the townsfolk of Dinant; in France, the inhabitants of Saint-Maixent, are credited with all sorts of absurdities. The citizens of Abdera, Sidonia, &c. were the noodles of the ancient Greeks, and not a few of the so-called jests of Hierocles reappear in our early English collections of facetiae, with a blundering Welshman or Frenchman in place of the pedant of the Asteia, and in more recent compilations—'Joe Miller' and its congeners—the conventional Irishman or Highlander. The similarity of simpleton stories in countries far apart at once suggests the question of their origin and diffusion, as in the case of popular tales generally. No doubt in many instances they sprang up independently, for human nature is everywhere much alike; but it is equally certain that a considerable number have been borrowed by one people from another, sometimes imported orally, most frequently taken from written sources. But however widely modern scholars may differ in opinion regarding the genealogy of popular fictions, their virtual identity among divers races is an interesting evidence of the kinship of man.
The Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham continued to be issued in chap-book form down to the second decade of the 19th century. The first reprint of the original work was made in 1840, with an introduction by Mr J. O. Halliwell. The Tales were also printed in W. C. Hazlitt's Shakespeare Jest-books (1864); in John Ashton's Chap-books of the
Eighteenth Century (1882); and in R. H. Cunningham's Amusing Prose Chap-books (1889). For a compendious collection of simpleton stories—of which the Gothamite tales form but a trifling part—see W. A. Clouston's Book of Noodles (Lond. 1888), which will be found to contain references to all the important books dealing with the subject, oriental and other. See also W. J. Thoms, in the Foreign Quarterly Review (1837, No. 40); and Deutscher Volkshumor, by Moritz Busch (Berlin, 1877).