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The custom of playing practical jokes on 1 April appears to date from the late seventeenth century. In one of the earliest references—'Fooles Holy Day - We observe it on ye first of April'—the antiquary John Aubrey identified the custom as having originated in Germany.
To mark April Fool's Day we offer a selection of historical hoaxers—some light-hearted, others less so—from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• Theodore Hook: creator of the Berners Street hoax of 1809, one of the finest set pieces in the history of practical jokes.
• Horace De Vere Cole: a man dedicated to practical joking, Cole's most celebrated deception was the Dreadnought affair (1910), though he also did unspeakable things in a London theatre.
• Spring-heeled Jack: in the 1830s Peckham residents were terrified by tales of a mystery assailant who vomited blue and white flames. An urban myth; a work of collective hysteria; or perhaps the prank of rebrobate peer, Henry de la Poer Beresford? Jack's tale is also available as a podcast episode.
• Piltdown Man is the subject rather than the instigator of a well-known scientific hoax. Bones discovered at Piltdown, Sussex, between 1910 and 1915 were at the time identified as the earliest human remains found in Europe.
Named Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the figure was claimed as the 'missing link' in human evolution but later revealed as a hoax. Dawson and his fellow excavator Arthur Woodward are now thought to have been members of the hoaxers' circle.
• The claim by Mary Toft to have given birth to fifteen rabbits led to the dispatch of George I's physician to investigate and to Toft becoming the 'rabbit woman of Godalming'.
Toft's case echoed that of Agnes Bowker from Market Harborough, Leicestershire, who was said to have given birth to a cat. Unlike Toft, Bowker did not confess to a hoax, though deceit was suspected by the bishop of London who reported on the affair.
• As children Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright created remarkably convincing photographs of fairies and winged gnomes, reproduced in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies (1922).
Earlier supernatural hoaxes include the supposed ghosts, Elizabeth Crofts—whose anti-Catholic protestations drew a crowd of 17,000 in 1554—and Elizabeth Parsons, whose performance as the 'Cock Lane ghost' caught Dr Johnson's imagination in 1762.
• Princess Caraboo: as an exotic princess found wandering in Bristol in 1817, Caraboo attracted huge interest for her mastery of the Javasu language and the making of chicken curry. Her deception exposed, she was identified as plain Mary Willcocks of Witheridge, Devon [also available as a podcast episode].
Others known for creating false identities include the supposed Formosan, George Psalmanazar, and Hastings-born Archibald Belaney who, as Grey Owl, passed as a Native American and entertained the royal family with his wilderness tales.
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