d void in the absence of
the lord's seal, and so their oppression continues.

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 bee