The wise fools of Gotham

On a rise a mile south of Gotham stood the Cuckoo Bush, replanted on the site of the first. The story went that the villagers believed any ground a king passed over became a public road for ever, so they kept King John out of their meadow. When his messengers came to punish them, they found the men trying to drown an eel, dragging carts onto a barn roof to shade a wood, rolling cheeses downhill to find their own way to Nottingham market and hedging in a cuckoo, and left them alone as a village of fools. Chambers tells the tale alongside the April fooling of the first of the month.