By 1600, this meaning of cockney was being particularly associated with the Bow Bells area. This may have developed from the sources above or separately, alongside such terms as " cock" and " cocker" which both have the sense of "to make a nestle-cock . 1386) of a "cokenay" as "a child tenderly brought up" and, by extension, "an effeminate fellow" or "a milksop". The current meaning of Cockney comes from its use among rural Englishmen (attested in 1520) as a pejorative term for effeminate town-dwellers, from an earlier general sense (encountered in " The Reeve's Tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales c. Concurrently, the mythical land of luxury Cockaigne ( attested from 1305) appeared under a variety of spellings, including Cockayne, Cocknay, and Cockney, and became humorously associated with the English capital London. The earliest recorded use of the term is 1362 in passus VI of William Langland's Piers Plowman, where it is used to mean "a small, misshapen egg", from Middle English coken + ey ("a cock's egg").
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