Books

Introduction

It should come as no surprise that nursery rhymes are full of sex, death, and cruelty. After all, children can be very vicious themselves. Over the centuries, though, traditional meanings have been lost and harsher versions of some rhymes subtly neutered, while others have fallen victim to changing cultural assumptions. All of these factors have caused the original point of many of the rhymes to be lost. This book attempts to rewrite the rewrites and rediscover lost meanings. At the very least, it presents some theories about what those lost meanings might be.

How adult songs such as “Oranges and Lemons” and “Goosie, Goosie Gander” often highly sexual, often politically satirical came to be rhymes read to children is almost a book in itself. Some were clearly adult rhymes that were sung to children because they were the only rhymes an adult knew. Others were deliberately created as a simple way to tell children a story or give them information: for example, “London’s Burning” (“There once was a great fire in London”). Some were clearly partisan, almost gloating, in the manner of football chants, while others conveyed more complex ideas in code, in order to avoid appearing disloyal to a monarch, for example. Like rhyming slang, many rhymes would have deliberately sought to hide their meaning from the uninitiated. Monarchists, for example, might have been cautious about singing “Little Boy Blue” in front of Cromwell’s men. In the same way that we have satire and irony on television today, songs and rhymes were clearly much more popular routes in the past.

What makes the search for meaning harder is that many nursery rhymes are just nonsense verse made up of pleasing sounds. Sometimes it’s impossible to know which have a story behind them and which do not. For example:

Higgledy Piggledy my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
Gentlemen come every day,
To see what my black hen has laid.

This could be about a hen. It could be, as some believe, about prostitution. It could even be about a specific prostitute or be based on an earlier, more direct, rhyme:

Little Blue Betty lived in a den,
She sold good ale to gentlemen.
Gentlemen came every day,
And little Blue Betty hopped away.
She hopped upstairs to make her bed,
And she tumbled down and broke her head.

Further speculation includes the suggestion that the “black hen” represents a spy feeding someone information, with the word “black” meaning dark or evil, the “eggs” representing gossip or rumour, and “hen” being used as a derogatory name for a male. Then again, it could be about a female spy. Or it could be about a gay spy (something Britain excels at). Then again, maybe it’s about a beautiful black woman, or just a woman with black hair and the many suitors whom she keeps at arm’s length by telling them stories, as did Odysseus’s wife.

In all probability, the rhyme is just about a hen that is a good layer. Similarly, it’s highly likely that once somebody’s son called John did go to bed with his trousers on and his mother elected to commemorate the event with the rhyme “Diddle, Diddle Dumpling, My Son John.” The difficulty is, once you start seeing meaning you can find it anywhere, and people have been looking a long time. As with conspiracy theories today, if you start with the assumption that there is an ulterior meaning, it is much easier to find one. So this collection attempts to strain out the more outlandish theories and select those for which there is most historical support.

Because the sense and associations of rhymes shifted over the centuries, even before their current incarnation as innocent verse for children, some of the rhymes’ initial meanings came to be superseded by events at a particular time. This is certainly true of “Grand Old Duke of York,” which was based on an earlier rhyme, “Brave Old King of France,” but was changed to refer to Frederick, Duke of York. It was also very likely the case with “Humpty-Dumpty,” an old rhyme that became associated with a cannon during the English Civil War. And even in our own time, if you ask people for an association with the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” many people will say Liverpool Football Club rather than the perfectly innocent Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel that the Koppites plundered it from.

The move towards sanitizing rhymes for children accelerated in the Victorian era, with its radically altered view of childhood, its recognition of childhood as a concept. Prior to that, little thought was given to shielding “adult sights” from children, even if it had been possible to do so. During the nineteenth century the rhymes were increasingly written up, illustrated, and sold as collections for children. This took them off the streets and into the parlours, making them at once more accessible but perhaps less potent. It would not do to blame the Victorians entirely for the loss of meaning in nursery rhymes, as it’s quite probable that some had already lost their point before then, and many were certainly written down prior to the nineteenth century. The Victorians were keen on deliberately rewriting them, however, as opposed to accidentally mistranslating them, in a bid to tidy the rhymes and give moral instruction. For the first time in British history, there was the beginning of a division between adult and children’s entertainment. Prior to that, children would be swigging ale and smoking ciggies down the bear pit like everyone else. It is perhaps odd that some of these “adult rhymes” ended up on the children’s side of the fence, although the process might have been assisted by the huge population shifts from the countryside to cities, which served to break up local oral traditions and take the rhymes out of their original context.

The constitutional reforms and political struggles of the nineteenth century reduced the necessity for clever allegorical topical songs, and protest no longer had to be conducted quite so covertly. There was no need for a complex, sly rhyme when you could stand up and call the queen a humourless, plum-faced parasite out loud and direct (well, at least in theory). Increasing literacy and improved communications added to a new, more up-front political style in Britain, which was underlined by the revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe. Catholic enemies (whether internal or external) ceased to be of concern. Britain (no Scotland to worry about now, after the Act of Union) was comfortably Protestant and, while it might be overstating the case to say that there was no sectarianism left, Catholics were certainly no longer being executed by the state for their beliefs. The same was true of continental Europe. For one hundred years after Napoleon, Britain virtually ceased to see Europe as a serious concern, preferring to look out to the world beyond the Continent. Remember, this is a small island off Europe that could come up with the newspaper headline “Fog in Channel. Continent Cut Off.”

It would be untrue, however, to say that the British today have entirely lost their talent for subversive song. The title of this book is lifted from a band, the Smiths, who are a good example of a British pop culture that has been a world leader for much of the last forty years, certainly in tackling difficult subjects through song. Furthermore, the desire for communal tribal chanting has not left even the most sanitized of football stadia. The songs may be less subtle in that context but, three hundred years from now, historians might well puzzle over this tirade of abuse myself and thousands of others had to suffer at Goodison Park in the twenty-first century:

You are a Scouser, an ugly Scouser,
You’re only happy on giro day.
Your mum’s out thieving,
Your dad’s drug dealing,
Please don’t take our hubcaps away.

Who knows, one day this might end up as a lullaby, with future etymologists pondering what a “hubcap” was and what “giro” could mean. In any case, it’s certainly no more vicious than a number of the rhymes collected here.

Although some of these rhymes appear to have their origins in the Middle Ages, the golden age for nursery rhymes lies in the years between the Tudors and the end of the Stuarts. This was Britain’s formative period, covering roughly a quarter of a millennium and bringing with it the Act of Union, the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, the Civil War, the growth of Empire and trading, the Glorious Revolution, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Isaac Newton, and much, much else besides. These were heady topics, even for the world’s largest language to cope with. So why not keep it short and tell it in rhyme? Teach the children to glory in tales with hidden depths: in heavy words lightly thrown.

Little Jack Horner a squatter?

Little Jack Horner

Little “Jack” Horner was actually Thomas Horner, steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury during the reign of King Henry VIII. Shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries, Mr. Horner settled into a very comfortable house. The rhyme tells the story of his acquisition of the property.

Always keen to raise fresh funds, Henry had shown a interest in Glastonbury (and other abbeys). Hoping to appease the roya appetite, the nervous Abbot, Richard Whiting, allegedly sent Thomas Horner to the King with a special gift. This was a pie containing the title deeds to twelve manor houses in the hope that these would deflect the King from acquiring Glastonbury Abbey. On his way to London, the not so loyal courier Horner apparently stuck his thumb into the pie and extracted the deeds for Mells Manor, a plum piece of real estate. The attempted bribe failed and the dissolution of the monasteries (including Glastonbury) went ahead from 1536 to 1540. Richard Whiting was subsequently executed, but the Horner family kept the house, so the moral of this one is: treachery and greed pay off, but bribery is a bad idea.

The only problem with this fantastic story is that the Horner family deny any wrongdoing on the part of their ancestor and claim that the property was bought fair and square at the time, along with various others. Then again, they would say that, wouldn’t they? A great deal of property change hands rather cheaply during the dissolution, however, so maybe Jack (Thomas) was just legally taking a decent slice of the pie on offer rather than illegally stealing it. There can be no doubt that the land was stolen from the Church, but perhaps it might be fairer to see it as some sort of redistribution by the state whereby land was taken from corrupt landlords and given to productive members of society. That is certainly one of the ways in which Henry VIII and his ministers presented it at the time.

Henry was a cunning politician and was surrounded by able and ambitious ministers, well able to exploit a situation for both personal gain and political effect. In 1531, laws were passed to limit the gathering of papal revenue in England. This was a response to Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. To be fair to the papacy, they had granted a special licence to allow the marriage in the first place, as Catherine was the widow of Henry’s brother. The divorce went through in 1533 and, in 1534, the Act of Supremacy was passed, making the monarch the head of the Church in England. This might have all looked rather sordid if in 1535 the Vicar-General of the Church in England, Thomas Cromwell, had not started a large-scale investigation into conduct within the Catholic Church and in particular within the monasteries. Corrupt clergy have been a staple of English comedy since the language was first written down and very probably before. Piers Plowman andThe Canterbury Tales both contain outright attacks on the Church, and movements for reform flourished across Europe and in England throughout the Middle Ages. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his complaints to a church door and by 1525 was conducting mass in German. Cromwell used his investigation and Luther’s theological arguments to deflect attention away from the activities of the King and towards the behaviour of the Church.

The Catholic Church drew half its annual income from its ownership of around one-quarter of the cultivated land in England and Wales. The confiscation of this land would not only provide Henry with a great deal of cash but also deprive his enemies of it. At first, in 1536, nearly four hundred of the smaller monasteries were closed and their land sold to local merchants and gentry. This provided a platform of economic support for the action. Th epolitical support came from the publication of Cromwell’s initial report via a series of leaks to Ye Olde Currant Bun*. The resulting headlines were all the sort you might expect: monks drunk at mass, nuns having it away with each other and/or getting pregnant with the monks, abbots fathering up to six children, corruption involving the illegal selling of timber, and an unnatural interest in choirboys. The whole affair became a bit like a Ken Russell fantasy.

Despite the propaganda onslaught, there was some resistance to Henry’s measures, with armed uprisings in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and, later, Norfolk. The Pilgrimage of Grace, as the Yorkshire uprising was known, was defeated by a mixture of overwhelming force and the offer of amnesty by Bluff King Hal’s men, which, naturally enough, was reneged on. The King did, however, keep his word and came up with a pension for the monks and nuns who cooperated with his plans. In 1538, everything was just beginning to calm down when the Pope stuck his oar in by excommunicating Henry. Henry retaliated by annexing the larger monasteries that were not originally part of the plan. The result was that, by 1540, all eight hundred fifty nunneries and monastic houses in the country had been taken over and had their assets liquidated.

Mr. Horner is mentioned in another rhyme that alludes to the transfer of this monastic land to the gentry

Hopton, Horner, Smyth and Thynne
When the abbots went out, they came in.

So Henry got a lot of land that was cheaply distributed to up-and-coming gentry such as Mr. Horner, as well as a colossal amount of gold plate, jewellery, and all manner of other trinkets. This was clearly useful for a man who famously had a habit of upgrading wives every few years. Not that he went in much for maintenance payments. Finally, where does this leave the Horner family? Well, the last time anybody checked, they were still living in Mells Manor.

Taking divinity classes?

Jack Be Nimble

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack jumped over a candlestick.

Various pagan associations here, with fortune-telling, fertility, and it being considered good luck to be able to jump over a candlestick without the flame going out. The ability to do this meant a prosperous year ahead. For no apparent reason, Buckinghamshire was once a real hot spot for candle leaping and even elevated it to a sport, which, considering some current Olympic “events,” is probably a reasonable thing to do. The lacemakers of Wendover used to practise it on the feast of their patron saint, St. Catherine, 25 November.

Perhaps if you were nimble enough to clear the flame, it meant you were a lean and healthy person up for the challenges of the year ahead, whereas the lardier among the crowd might cause a draught and put the fire out. Maybe it was some early management test to assess the aptness of workers for the job, with those who put out the fire being laid off. This could certainly be thought of as bad luck.

Before you dismiss what’s being said as a flight of fancy,just run your mind over some of the absurd management-training courses and aptitude tests currently in vogue. In comparison, jumping over a candlestick is quick, cost-effective, and would probably yield better results. In fact, a bookcalled The Pagan Way to Human Resource Management would surely be a great success. Chapter headings by guest authors could include one by the Druids on sacrifice, one by followers of Zeus and the Hellenic tradition on bull markets, and maybe a piece by the followers of Osiris and the Egyptian pantheon on pyramid selling.

There are happier links for this rhyme in pre-Christian fertility rituals involving jumping over fire and some, perhaps more sensible, young couples today still “jump the broomstick.” Fire jumping for fertility is one of the ceremonies shown in the film The Wicker Man, which concerns pagan religious beliefs on a Scottish island in the last century. Those who have seen the film might remember the divinity lessons that consisted of naked girls leaping over fire in order to promote their fecundity. When the policeman from the mainland (played by Edward Woodward) objects to the girls’ nakedness, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) points out that it would be much too dangerous with their clothes on. To those of you who have not seen The Wicker Man, it’s really time you did.

It’s falling down

London Bridge

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.

Build it up with wood and clay, wood and clay, wood and clay.
Wood and clay will wash away, my fair lady.

Build it up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars.
Iron bars will bend and bow, my fair lady.

Build it up with silver and gold, silver and gold, silver and gold.
Silver and gold will be stole away, my fair lady. 

Build it up with strongest stone, strongest stone, strongest stone.
Strongest stone will last alone, my fair lady.

“London Bridge” is most likely based on a Norwegian poem by Ottar Svarte, celebrating the victory of King Olav (also a saint in Norway) in alliance with the English King Aethelred (Unready Eddie) against the invading Danes. Olav, whose reward is a street named after him near the current bridge, Tooley Street (if you swap the “Y” for a “V” and add an “S” at the front, it makes sense), cannily attached his ships to the wooden London Bridge and waited for the tide so he could tow the bridge away. The poem itself, which loses a bit in the translation, goes like this:

London Bridge is broken down,
Gold is won and bright renown.
Shields resounding, war horns sounding,
Hildur shouting in the din!
Arrows singing, mail coats ringing,
Odin makes our Olav win!
King Aethelred has found a friend,
Brave Olav will his throne defend,
In bloody fight maintain his right,
Win back his land with blood-red hand,
And Aethelred’s son on his throne replace—
Edmund, the star of every royal race.

Except that the Danes didn’t like Edmund (Aethelred’s son) and chose to back Cnut (Canute), who sneakily, after the Norwegians had gone home, took their fleet south of the bridge site by means of a huge channel. After defeating Edmund, the Danes split the kingdom and indeed London itself into Danish and Saxon parts. Anyway, that’s all very interesting but has nothing to do with the nursery rhyme, which appears to be based on the Olav victory poem but extended to celebrate the new stone bridge.

The meaning of the “new” rhyme is a bit obvious but worth exploring for the story of the bridge itself. The rhyme is both a celebration of the most famous London bridge and a comment on the failure of its predecessors. The bridge in the rhyme was completed in the thirteenth century and lasted six hundred years. In 1832, it was replaced by a gorgeous bridge built by John Rennie and then subsequently by the drab slab hastily erected in 1973 a little way upstream of the original sites. The rhyme recognizes that the six-hundred-year-old bridge required constant maintenance against the forces of Thames and tide, as it was always being rebuilt over the period. But it did stand the test of time, even if the maintenance of it went on for ever, in much the same way as the rhyme can go on for ever (remember those additional verses).

Previous bridges had been a bit short-term. There had been a Roman bridge of wood and a succession of new bridges between the tenth and twelfth centuries, including the one that Olav memorably towed away. So the stone bridge, which took thirty-three years to build and had a road twenty feet wide and three hundred yards long, was a real step forward, a wonder of the world. In 1209, the bridge had twenty arches, each sixty feet high and thirty feet wide, with twenty feet between each arch. There was a tower and a gate at both the northern and southern ends of the bridge. Beyond the south tower and gate there was a wooden drawbridge to prevent an invasion of London from that direction. There were shops, houses, and even a chapel on it. It was a scene of lavish celebrations and jousting tournaments. Traitors’ heads were displayed on spears there, a fact cheerfully commemorated by a giant white spike on the current bridge. The bridge was a bit of a hazard and, aside from death by spike to the head, parts of it frequently fell off and there were a number of disastrous fires. A consequence was that many people died on or near the bridge, including a boatload of Jews travelling to exile after their expulsion by Edward I in 1290. They drowned in the rapids caused by the bridge’s narrow arches, and apparently their ghosts still haunt the north shore, not far from where the monument to the Fire of London stands today.

These rapids and the actions of the tide are the reason the current bridge stands one hundred or so feet to the west of the original ones. John Rennie’s 1832 bridge was destabilized by the tides that had previously been held in check by the tight arches of the six-hundred-year-old bridge. Once free of these constrictions, the Thames undermined Rennie’s bridge much more swiftly than anyone had anticipated. Its move to the US piece by piece, where it is now positioned in a park at Lake Havasu City, Arizona (originally without water, the lake was created for it to span), was a wonderful feat of organization and engineering, and takes some beating for sheer eccentricity. The current bridge, in contrast, is more of a monument to early 1970s functionalism and has little to recommend it. For the definitive account of London Bridge, read Patricia Pierce’s Old London Bridge.

Except that she doesn’t mention the human sacrifices. It was apparently customary in the long ago and far away to secure a building or bridge through sacrifice to the deities of the area or river. The preferred offering involved children, their blood, or, if possible, the sealing in of a child with a candle and hunk of bread at the foot of the bridge. When the Bridge Gate at Bremen was demolished in the nineteenth century, the skeleton of a child was indeed found implanted in the foundations. Nor are songs about bridges falling down unique to Britain, with examples coming from Italy, France, and Germany. The idea behind the sacrifice was that the spirit of the youngster looked over the bridge using the light and stayed awake by eating the food.

In Romania it was believed that the sacrifice of a person’s shadow to a building or bridge would do the trick. People would be enticed to stand over the foundation and their shadow measured. This written measurement was then buried witthe foundation stone. Sadly, it was also believed that the person whose shadow was buried in such a fashion would die within forty days of the building’s completion. So-called “shadow traders” still existed in Eastern Europe until the nineteenth century, and people would shout out warnings to those passing freshly erected buildings to beware in case someone stole their shadow. These are interesting, if gruesome, legends, but there is scant evidence linking London Bridge specifically to such practices.

“Rivers and child sacrifice,” you might scoff. “Dark Ages stuff!” Except that in the twenty-first century such practices still take place. On 21 September 2001, the headless torso of a young boy was found floating near Tower Bridge. He had been used as part of something called a muti ceremony, in which the body parts of a child are used for medicinal purposes or to bring good fortune to a business enterprise. Police throughout Europe believe that there have been perhaps a dozen such cases .

Reprinted from Heavy Words Lightly Thrown by Chris Roberts by permission of Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA). Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Chris Roberts. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.