The Cuckoo

The name and sign of the Cuckoo Bush pub at Gotham (Nottinghamshire) celebrate the best-known joke about the best-known group of village fools in English folklore, the Wise Men of Gotham. Having noticed that cuckoos arrive when summer begins and that soon after they have disappeared the summer too is past its best, they deduced that if only they could stop the bird from leaving, winter would never come. So when they saw a cuckoo settling on a bush they hurriedly built a fence to pen it in – and were quite amazed when it simply skimmed over the top of the fence and flew away. ‘If only we’d built it a foot or two higher we’d have got her!’ they cried.

For five hundred years, this tale has been told to prove that Gotham men are fools. But were they? Maybe not. According to Robert Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire (1797), the people of Gotham had offended King John by preventing him and his retinue from riding across certain meadows (which would have made these meadows a public road for evermore). Knowing he would send men to punish them, they started acting like complete idiots – some tried to drown an eel in the village pond, others rolled cheeses downhill so that they could make their own way to market, ‘and some were employed in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon an old bush’. Seeing this, the king’s men just laughed at them and went away.

The current signboard shows the villagers cutting stakes and beginning to raise the fence, while the cuckoo looks on from a tree; and earlier version showed the moment when it astonishes them by flying away. The cunning plan had worked!

At Madeley in Shropshire there is a Cuckoo Oak pub, with the same basic story but no alternative twist to it. The villagers, ironically called ‘the wise men of Madeley’, were so sad to think that the cuckoo would fly away and take the summer with it that they decided to keep it imprisoned. So they waited till it settled on an oak tree, and then held hands in a circle round it. Their neighbours thought they were behaving madly.

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Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.