: The old lady whose whole time seems to have been devoted to her dog, who always kept her on the trot, and always made game of her. Her temper was proof against this wilfulness on the part of her dog, and her politeness never forsook her […].
: Hubbard, Mother, the old lady who in the English nursery jingle went to the cupboard to find her poor dog a bone, has been plausibly identified with St. Hubert and patron of dogs and of the chase.
: Edmund Spenser, in Mother Hubbard’s Tale (1591), uses the name simply as that of an old wife, who tells a story of Reynard and the ape, to relieve the weariness of the poet during a spell of sickness.
: The feigned narrator of Spenser’s poem entitled “Mother Hubberd’s Tale,” which is a satire upon the common modes of rising in Church and State, and which purports to be one of several tales told to the author by his friends, to beguile a season of sickness.
: This seems to be the first appearance on the literary stage, at least in England, of this eminent person. Yet she was evidently a well‐known figure even then. To mention her honoured name was enough. Her great reputation made any fuller record unnecessary. Not to know her argued oneself unknown. But at this distance of time we wonder who she was, and of what origin.
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