[2] In John Badcock's slang dictionary of 1823, the explanation is given that "One Bolsover having hung himself from a beam while standing on a pail, or bucket, kicked this vessel away in order to pry into futurity and it was all UP with him from that moment: Finis".
[3] The theory favoured by the OED relates to the alternative definition of a bucket as a beam or yoke that can be used to hang or carry things on.
[2][4] William Shakespeare used the word in this sense in his play Henry IV Part II where Falstaff says:[2] Swifter than he that gibbets on the Brewers Bucket.It has also been speculated that the phrase might originate from the Catholic custom of holy-water buckets:[6] After death, when a body had been laid out ... the holy-water bucket was brought from the church and put at the feet of the corpse.
Yet another theory seeks to extend the saying beyond its earliest use in the 16th century with reference to the Latin proverb Capra Scyria, the goat that is said to kick over the pail after being milked (920 in Erasmus' Adagia).
Thus a promising beginning is followed by a bad ending or, as Andrea Alciato phrased it in the Latin poem accompanying the drawing in his Emblemata (1524), "Because you have spoilt your fine beginnings with a shameful end and turned your service into harm, you have done what the she-goat does when she kicks the bucket that holds her milk and with her hoof squanders her own riches.
[8] The expression occurs as the title of a mid-19th-century American minstrel ballad with the ending "Massa Death bring one bag and we Kickeraboo".