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Proverbs in 1546 as part of the following rhyming couplet:

    Whan the sunne shynth make hey.
Whiche is to say.
Take time whan time cometh, lest
    time steale away.

    The phrase appears as ‘Yt is well therefore to make hay while the sunne shines’ in a 1583 novel, Philotimus: The Warre between Nature and Fortune , by Brian Melbancke.
    There’s no evidence of an earlier version of this phrase existing in other languages so it is thought to be a home-grown homily originating from medieval farming lore. Hay is made from cut grasses which had to be dried in the fields before they could be baled and stored as animal feed. Dry weather was crucial for a good yield since wet weather could cause the grasses to rot before they were dry enough to store. Using medieval tools, harvesting the hay took several days and predicting the weather several days ahead was almost impossible so farmers had to take the first opportunity available to them.
    The phrase is likely to have been used metaphorically from the outset and this was certainly the case by 1673, when Richard Head published his glossary of the language of thieves and rogues Th e Canting Academy , and included the line :

    She . . . was resolv’d . . . to make Hay whilest the Sun shin’d.

    We still use the phrase as a call to act while you can ( ‘while the iron’s hot’ ) , though it can also now refer more explicitly to having fun while you have the chance. There is a reminder of mortality too in its echo of Horace’s carpe diem (‘seize the day’).
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The pot calling the kettle black
    This sixteenth-century caution against hypocrisy has its origins in the kitchens of the late Middle Ages. Food was cooked over an open fire and in order that they could withstand the intense heat, pots, kettles and other cooking utensils were all made from the same durable metal – cast iron, which turns black with use. A pot that called a kettle black would therefore be making a criticism that applied equally to itself.
    Exactly when this phrase first came into use is difficult to pinpoint but by 1620, when Thomas Shelton translated Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote , a slightly different version was well known enough to allow him this reference:

    You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle,
    â€˜Avant, black-browes’.

    By the end of the seventeenth century the frying pan had been replaced by the pot and in 1693 William Penn, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, included the saying in the form we still use today in his collection of maxims, Some Fruits of Solitude .
    For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality, is for the Pot to call the Kettle black.

    An early dictionary of English slang, A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew , compiled by ‘B. E.’ and published in London around 1698, has a more trenchant version:

    â€˜The Pot calls the kettle black A–’, when one accuses another of what he is as Deep in himself.

    These days the phrase, or sometimes the snappier ‘Pot, kettle, black’, is still in regular use as a chastisement when people pick on someone for a character trait that they share or a mistake that they have been guilty of themselves.
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A burnt child dreads the fire
    This is a Middle English homily that has been around since the mid-thirteenth century when it appeared in a collection of wise words called The Proverbs of Hendyng as: ‘Brend child fuir fordredeth.’
    The sixteenth-century English writer John Lyly used the phrase in his 1580 work Euphues and His England :

    A burnt childe dreadeth the fire . . . Thou mayst happely forsweare thy selfe, but thou shalt neuer delude me. 

    The message is clear: a person becomes distrustful of something that – or someone who – has harmed them. In the Middle Ages people lived in close proximity to fire as it