The story is narrated by a man who says he was sitting outside the Pyewipe Inn (which first opened in 1788 on the Foss Dyke, and is popular today) when he heard this tale from an Oxfordshire man who had moored his barge there. It tells of a young man called Jack who is due to marry a young woman called Polly. One day, when he reaches his fiancée’s house, he finds mother, father and daughter in tears: there is a well in the garden, and the three are terrified that, should Jack and Polly have a child, it will fall in and drown. The solution is, of course, obvious, but Jack doesn’t provide it. Instead, he gets angry. He says he will go out and buy new boots, and won’t marry at all unless he finds three fools before they wear out. He finds them, right enough: a man trying to shovel sunshine, another attempting to cut open a rock with a knife, and a third struggling to pull a cow onto a barn by its collar. In each case, he provides the stranger with the solution, and he concludes that his fiancée and her parents ‘isn’t noa softer then gen’rality of foaks’, so he marries her before he has a month’s wear from the boots. The old man then puts a railing round the well, then removes it, saying that if the Lord means to take the children ‘a bit o’ fencin’ wean’t stan’ i’ his roäd’, and then ‘burial clubs cum’d up’ and ‘then bairns begun deein’ afoor iver thaay was big enif to creäp doon gardin’ to well. If Loord didn’t rek ‘em, sum’ats else did, soa thaay niver hed chanche to fall I’to watter an’ droond the’rsens’.

This tale was told, with flourishes, by Mabel Peacock in Tales and Rhymes in the Lindsey Folk-Speech (George Jackson, 1886), and a version of it (without the ending provided above) is rendered in contemporary English by Maureen James in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2012). It is also recorded by Katharine Briggs in Folk Tales of Britain (1970); Briggs notes that there are ‘many kindred versions’ from other parts of the country. The most famous versions of essentially the same story are ‘The Six Sillies’ (1890) by Andrew Lang, and Joseph Jacobs’ ‘The Three Sillies’ (1890), both of which were published four years after Peacock’s version.*

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Thanks to Tim Davies for providing contextual information.