the nursery tale, is from the French Le Petit Poucet, byCharles Perrault (1630), but it is probably of Anglo-Saxon origin. There is in the Bodleian Library a ballad about Tom Thumb, “printed for John Wright in 1630.”
Tom Thumb. The son of a common ploughman and his wife, who was knighted byKingArthur, and was killed by the poisonous breath of a spider, in the reign of King Thunstone, the successor of Arthur. (Nursery tale.)
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