Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/551



man, spending their days sitting, and whose hands, though they labour, are white; the warlocks, and the usurers.

In popular opinion, this distant isle was far more beautiful than paradise, and the rumours of its splendour so excited the mind of the mediævals, that the western land became the subject of satyre and jest. It was nicknamed Cocaigne or Schlaraffenland.

An English poem, “apparently written in the latter part of the thirteenth century,” says Mr. Wright (S. Patrick’s Purgatory), “which was printed very inaccurately by Hickes, from a manuscript which is now in the British Museum,” describes Cocaigne as far away out to sea, west of Spain. Slightly modernized it runs thus:— “Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cokaygne is of fairer sight; What is there in Paradise? Both grass and flower and green ris (boughs). Though there be joy and great dute (pleasure), There is not meat, but fruit. There is not hall, bower, nor bench, But water man’s thirst to quench.” In Paradise are only two men, Enoch and Elias; but Cocaigne is full of happy men and women.