Cockaigne or Cockayne () is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, it is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheese). Writing about Cockaigne was commonplace in Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at scarcity and the strictures of asceticism. Etymology While the first recorded uses of the word are the Latin Cucaniensis and the Middle English Cokaygne, one line of reasoning has the name tracing to Middle French (pays de) cocaigne "(land of) plenty", ultimately adapted or derived from a word for a small sweet cake sold to children at a fair. In Ireland, it was mentioned in the Kildare Poems, composed c. 1350. In Italian, the same place is called Paese della Cuccagna; the Dutch equivalent is Luilekkerland ("relaxed luscious, delicious land"), translated from the Middle Dutch word Cockaengen, and the German equivalent is Schlaraffenland. In Spanish, an equivalent place is named Jauja, after a rich mining region of the Andes, and País de Cucaña ("fools' paradise") may also signify such a place. From Swedish dialect lubber ("fat lazy fellow") comes Lubberland, popularized in the ballad An Invitation to Lubberland. In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London as the land of Cockneys ("Cockney" from a "cock's egg", an implausible creature; see also basilisk), though the two are not linguistically connected otherwise. The composer Edward Elgar used the word "Cockaigne" for his concert overture and suite evoking the people of London, Cockaigne (In London Town), Op. 40 (1901). The Dutch villages of Kockengen and Koekange may be named after Cockaigne, though this has been disputed. The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer. Descriptions Like Atlantis and El Dorado, the land of Cockaigne was a utopia. It was a fictional place where, in a parody of paradise, idleness and gluttony were the principal occupations. In Specimens of Early English Poets (1790), George Ellis printed a 13th-century French poem called "The Land of Cockaigne" where