The Bishop Has Put His Foot In It

When milk or porridge was burnt to the pan, old wives and servant girls used to say that the bishop had put his foot in it, or that there was a bishop in the pan. Tusser used the saying in his Five Hundred Points of good husbandry, and Tyndale in 1528 explained it as a jibe at bishops, who spoiled whatever they meddled with. Hone gives it beside an account of the Oxford winter drink called a bishop.