Mystery
A Coggeshall Job
They rode to Lexden to fetch back their missing clock stroke.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Victorian jubilee clock tower in a market town
- Legend from
- Proverb recorded 1670
- Tone
- Light-hearted
Coggeshall: where the clock lost a stroke, and the townsfolk rode to Lexden to fetch it back.
'A Coggeshall job' was Essex slang for a botched or pointless task. It mocked the supposed foolishness of the town. John Ray's 1670 collection of proverbs mentions the saying. In the best-known tale, Coggeshall's clock struck eleven at noon, and when townsfolk heard that Lexden's had struck twelve at eleven, they rode over to fetch the missing stroke. Other tales have them hauling a cow onto the church roof to graze, chaining up a wheelbarrow bitten by a mad dog in case it went mad, and carrying sunlight indoors in hampers. Some say they even tried to move their church.