In my last post we were sailing down the Thames, through Docklands to the sea. I thought that I’d come ashore for a short while. The last leg of that Docklands trip can wait until next time. Whilst enjoying dry land, I’ll try to answer an interesting question posed by H, a family member who didn’t grow up in the UK. Their query – what’s going on with all these weird British nursery rhymes? Mice with their tails cut off, cows jumping the moon, blackbirds in pies…?
By sheer serendipity whilst researching this post, I fell across an invaluable source of reference in the depths of our “book room” (aka the spare bedroom). It’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie. The book’s a gem, listing over 500 rhymes. That’s not including the many variations listed for each one. I used it extensively when writing this post, so I extend my gratitude to them.
Round and round the garden
Here are the two most important things to say about nursery rhymes. Most are very old indeed, and many were definitely not written specifically for the nursery! Childhood innocence and sensitivity? They are very much Victorian conceits. And even then, only for the children of the better off. Prior to Victoria, children were generally treated as mini adults. So, rhymes that appealed to adults were shared with children, with absolutely no filters. Rhymes arrived in the nursery from all over the place: ballads from plays, broadsheets, political satire, riddles, country sayings, even spells and incantations. But they invariably trickled down to the nursery from the grownups.
A good way to try and identify a later nursery rhyme, dating from Victorian times and after, is to look for an excess of sentimentality:
Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear,
Once step, two step, tickly under there (c1945)
Oh, where, oh, where has my little dog gone?
Oh, where, oh, where can he be?
With his ears so short, and his tail so long,
Oh, where, oh, where can he be? (c1864)
You see what I mean? Whereas the rhymes that pre-date Victoria are far more dark and edgy – and adult.
I spy Tom Thumb
But it takes a bit of detective work to deduce the age and origins of our oldest verses. That’s because there were no written collections of British nursery rhymes, until 1744. That’s when Tom Thumb’s Song Book, (and, later that same year), his Pretty Song Book were published. Between the two books, they contain over 50 rhymes. Browsing through the contents, I immediately recognised at least fifteen, including old favourites such as Baa Baa, Black Sheep and Hickory Dickory Dock. You can see Tom’s full offerings here…
Reading Tom’s rhymes though, you can sense the alarm the prissy Victorians felt about their bawdy Georgian forebears. They made sure that a certain number of Thumb’s verses were sanitised, or more drastically, banned from the nursery altogether. And because these rhymes were quietly forgotten by them, they weren’t passed onto us. Rhymes such as:
Piss a bed
Piss a bed
Barley slut,
Your bum is so heavy
You can’t get up.
…the gory story of what really was in that pie…
Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty naughty boys
Baked in a pie
And with far too much scatology for the Victorians…
Little Robbin red breast,
Sitting on a pole,
Niddle, Noddle,
Went his head,
And Poop went his Hole.
Fee Fi Fo Fum
Thumb’s 1744 offerings were the first written collections of British nursery rhymes. But Tommy had simply gathered together songs and verses that had already been around for years. The Opies shared some fascinating academic research in their dictionary. At least one in four of our current body of nursery rhymes would probably have been known and – who knows? – recited, by a young William Shakespeare!
So how do academics calculate the real age of our rhymes ? They use several techniques. Predominantly, they have a dig through tantalising fragments of texts from earlier documents, trying to spot similarities in language.
For example, a reading of Shakespeare’s folios shows that Will himself wasn’t above using scraps of nursery rhymes in his work. This of course suggests that he remembered the actual verses from his own childhood. Like this example from The Merchant of Venice:
Let us all ring fancy’s knell;
I’ll begin it – Ding, dong, bell.
And in King Lear, Edgar chants:
Fie fo and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man!
London Bridge is falling down
Let’s go back now even further, a thousand years, and look at a very old piece of documentation. First though, here’s a brief history lesson. Back in Saxon England, the Vikings were nothing but trouble-makers. They attacked the coastline, fighting and killing, kidnapping and worse. Unless of course they’d been paid off with a hefty bribe of Danegeld.
In 1014, the English Saxons called upon their sometime-ally, the Norwegian King Olaf Haraldson, to come to their aid. They needed help to defend their capital of Londonwic from marauding Danes. The enemy had taken possession of London Bridge, and had set up camp on it, using it as a base for their attacks.
Olaf came up with an ingenious idea. He sailed his longship under the rickety wooden bridge spanning the Thames. His men used their hide shields as protection against the missiles hurled down at them by the Vikings. Olaf’s men fixed ropes to the wooden piles holding the bridge up, and then sailed off, using the strength of the tide to pull, loosen and uproot the piles. Down fell London Bridge.
Its destruction, and the subsequent waterlogging of the Danes, along with Olaf’s many other feats, was celebrated by the Norse poet Ottar Svarte. Here’s a modern version of his 11th century poem:
London Bridge is broken down.
Gold is won, and bright renown.
Shields resounding,
War-horns sounding,
Hild is shouting in the din!
Arrows singing,
Mail-coats ringing –
Odin makes our Olaf win!
Surely the ancient root of our well-loved nursery rhyme?
Humpty Dumpty and friends
Academics also attempt to date rhymes by looking for similar versions in other languages. They search for clues of how and when any cross-fertilisation happened. Take for example, our well-beloved Humpty Dumpty. His namesakes spread all over Europe, all of them sitting on and falling off walls. He is known as Boule Boule in France, Thille Lille in Sweden, Hillerin Lillerin in Finland. In Germany he has several relatives, including Wirgele-Wargele, Girgele-Gagele, Runtzelken-Puntzelken and Humpelken-Pumpelekn.
Some linguists think that we can date Humpty’s origins back for, not hundreds, but a thousand years.
Rain, rain, go away
And it gets even more interesting, looking at what academics would call meta narratives, or common themes, across thousands of years.
Rain, rain, go away,
Come again another day.
Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme, but also an incantation to raise good weather. The Opies wrote that, in ancient Greece, children would solemnly recite “come forth, beloved sun”, whenever the sun went behind a cloud. That’s according to the Greek dramatist Strattis, writing around 370 BC. You can find similar incantations for better weather in Roman and Babylonian scripts.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…
… bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
I’d bet that most readers would recall their mothers singing this to them, when being tucked up in bed. It’s often referred to as the White Paternoster. Thomas Ady, writing in 1656, mentions an old lady who “had lived also in Queen Marie’s time” (that’s Mary Tudor, 1540s), who remembered reciting it as a child.
But older than that, Geoffrey Chaucer, writing in the 1370s, refers to the White Paternoster. You find versions throughout Europe. German writer Johannes Agricola in the early 1500s recalled this version from his childhood…
Ich will heint schlafen gehen,
Zwölf engel sollen mit mir gehen…
The number of guardian angels guarding Johannes was far higher than our rhyme – zwölf , or twelve. But going back yet further, look at the similarities to this prayer from the ancient Jewish cabbala, “against the terrors that threaten by night”:
At my right, Michael,
At my left Gabriel,
Before me Uriel,
Behind me Raphael
And of equal antiquity, this Babylonian prayer:
Shamas before me,
Behind me Sin,
Nergal at my right,
Ninib at my left.
Seeking protection from the terrors of darkness: a truly universal activity across time.
Atishoo, atishoo, it’s all made up!
One of the most interesting things I found when researching this post, was the sheer inventiveness, and I must say, often wishful thinking, of some amateur historians. There’ve been multiple attempts to tie the rhymes to real historical events, often using very flimsy evidence indeed.
For example, we all know that Ring a ring o’ Roses is supposed to represent the boils on the bodies of victims of the bubonic plague. But sadly there’s no written evidence to support this. Likewise, The King of Spain’s daughter who came to visit me, ( in order to view my little nut tree), was supposed to commemorate the state visit of Joanna of Castille to Henry VII of England, in 1506. And Mary Mary, Quite Contrary supposedly refers to Bloody Mary, queen of England in the 1550s. Neither idea has any corroborating contemporary written evidence.
You might recall from my earlier post on Oliver Cromwell the tale of poor old Humpty Dumpty. Allegedly, he (it) was a Royalist cannon that fell from the walls of Colchester Castle, during the siege by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War. However, as you’ve just read earlier, it’s a rhyme that’s known far across Europe (and North America), and considerably predates the 1640s Civil War. Perhaps the Roundheads appropriated the well-loved nursery rhyme for their victory jingle?
Following the adage that you should never let facts get in the way of a good story, it’s been proposed similarly that Little Bo Peep was Mary, Queen of Scots, Old Mother Hubbard was Cardinal Wolsey, Jack Spratt Charles I and Simple Simon James II.
Ding Dong Bell
A special shout out though, must go to John Bellenden Kerr, whose 1834 An Essay on the Archaeology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes scales the heights of bonkers fantasy. He invented what he claimed was an early form of Dutch. Then, with no evidence whatsoever, he proposed that many English nursery rhymes derive from his self-imagined language. Can you recognise this offering?
Ding d’honig-beld,
Die kaest in the weld.
Hwa put heer in?
Lyt’el Je haen Je Grijn……
Two further volumes followed his original, mad tome. As the Opies write, “Kerr has given delight to students of mania ever since”.
The Grand Old Duke of York
Of course, just because there’s no written evidence to prove a link between a rhyme and an historical event or figure, it doesn’t mean that there’s not a grain of truth hidden there. It’s just a pity that false trails get in the way of more verifiable stories, like that of good King Olaf and London Bridge.
Or like the Grand old Duke of York, marching up the hill. He is commonly identified as Frederick, the son of George III. But hold on… in 1642, over a hundred years before Frederick’s birth, there’s a popular song with the lyrics:
The king of France went up the Hill
With forty thousand men…
Nursery rhymes so often are like slippery eels, and they prove impossible to pin down.
Hiding in Plain sight
It’s time for the children to go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, listen to a lullaby, and ask Matthew and Mark et al to keep watch overnight. Some things truly don’t change through the ages. It’s not often I write a post and find the history just laying there, hardly changed over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In this post I didn’t have to dig much at all, my job was easy.
It’s the same with most things “folk” I think, such as folk songs and fairy stories. They’re different from the history of the rich and powerful, which so often didn’t really touch the lives of the common people. The reason, I think, is because folky things are generally handed down orally. This makes nursery rhymes a nightmare to verify (as you can see from my struggles above).
But it does make them resilient. You only need a fragment of verse, sung by one old granny to their grandchild, for the song to carry on for another generation or two. I’ll end with the thought that, in a hundred years or so, they’ll be a child somewhere clamouring for another verse of…
Each peach pear plum,
I spy Tom Thumb…. Published in 1978!
