Meaning & Analysis
A ridiculous, impossible, or nonsensical story—idle talk not meant to be believed.
Insights
Badge of nonsense
Labels a report as absurd on its face, a signal to dismiss it as fancy rather than fact.
Spectacle over sense
Highlights talk that chases amusement and shock-value; entertainment displaces truth or substance.
Credulity test
Mocks the listener who might swallow anything; the phrase exposes and satirizes gullibility.
Distraction tactic
A flamboyant digression used to fill time, dodge hard questions, or pacify an audience with noise.
Hollow ornament
Baroque detail and novelty mask emptiness, the verbal equivalent of gilding a void.
Grotesque impossibility
In early modern England horseflesh was taboo or famine-food; a ‘roasted horse’ is comically incongruous and practically unthinkable, making the very image a shorthand for absurdity (cf. repeated uses from c.1570 onward).
Entertainment cue
Writers frame it as patter to make even ‘an ass laugh’ and to ‘entertain his mistress’—a stock tag for filler tales whose purpose is mirth, not meaning.
Critical barb at trivial art
Gascoigne likens overly easy verse to such a tale, implying that smoothness without substance is comic nonsense dressed as craft.
Lexicographic pairing
Cotgrave files it with ‘tales of a tub,’ grouping it among recognized labels for idle, fabulous yarns—the idiom functioned as a genre marker for bunk.
Pun and devaluation
Later quip about the ‘Tail of a roasted Horse’ plays on tale/tail to suggest worthlessness—the mere tail-end of talk, a nothing-burger with a flourish.
Cultural analogues
Cognate dismissals—‘cock-and-bull story,’ ‘tall tale’—show a cross-cultural need to flag stories that privilege extravagance over plausibility.
Rhetorical Devices
Absurdist imagery
The culinary picture is grotesquely outsized, instantly signaling impossibility and cueing laughter.
Hyperbole
Exaggeration to the point of the fantastic marks the tale as beyond the limits of belief.
Metonymy
‘Roasted horse’ stands in for any overblown, content-free anecdote; the food image metonymizes empty fare.
Allusive shorthand
Functions as a dismissive label rather than a full sentence, a clipped tag that compresses a whole judgment into a few words.
Paronomasia (variant)
The ‘tale/tail’ quip exploits sound-play to downgrade the story’s value, turning wit against waffle.
Transcription
Quotations
You tell vs a tale of a rosted horse.
The verse that is to easie is like a tale of a rosted horse.
He would . . tell mee a tale of a rosted horse, onely to make me merrie withall.
Procus . . To entertaine his Mistris eares withall, Tells her a long tale of a rosted horse.
And then a Tale of a roasted horse, to make an asse laugh, for lacke of witte.
Idle histories; vaine relations; tales of a tub, or, of a rosted horse.
Since you are angrie Sir, I am bold to tell you that I am a woman, and a rib. —Of a roasted horse.
A tale of a Rosted Horse.
It amounts to no more than the Tail of a roasted Horse.
Cross References
Explanation
[A nonsensical story.]
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.