NURSERY CRIMES

Most nursery rhymes are not only based on historical fact, but rather unpleasant historical fact at that. You'll never view them the same way again!

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400 Old King Cole

Coel Hen was a Romano-British king who ruled somewhere around Cumbria, and as a post-Roman overlord, of the British fought many battles against the Picts and Scots. His daughter (St.) Helena married the Roman emperor Constantius.

1000 London Bridge is falling down

It would if you tied a load of Viking ships to it and told them all to row away, which is what the Vikings did after an unsuccessful attack on London around the year 986.

1530 Sing a song of sixpence

Sixpence in tax, payable either in coins or in kind. A pocketful of rye was, in Tudor times, worth 6d. Blackbirds, and birds alive in pies, were unusual but not unknown. The queen eating bread and honey was Catherine of Aragon, whilst the maid in the garden was Anne Boleyn. The blackbird pecking her nose off was the special French executioner Henry kindly hired especially for her.

1530 Little Jack Horner

Jack Horner was an emissary of the Abbot of Glastonbury. In 1536, alarmed at the closure of the smaller monasteries, the Abbot sent Henry VIII a bribe, in the form of a pie containing 12 manorial deeds. But Horner stopped in his home village of Mells, put his thumb into the pie and took the deeds for himself. The abbey was duly destroyed, and the Horner family still live at Mells to this day.

1550 Mary, Mary, quite contrary

Mary Queen of Scots, who was fond of gardening. The silver bells and cockle-shells were designs on her wedding-dress for her ill-fated marriage to Francis II of France, and the pretty maids her ladies-in-waiting. Less salubriously, Mary's frequent changes of husband were reflected in the cockle chells; a cuckold was (and still is) a word meaning a married person whose partner is secretly unfaithful.

1560 Ride a-cock horse to Banbury Cross

Elizabeth I inherited an England which was completely broke. She got round this partly by her ‘progresses’ (e.g. to Banbury), where she would travel the country to be seen by her people. It made her more popular - and staying at the big houses of her loyal subjects saved her loads of cash!

1630 Jack and Jill

Rival legends claim two windmills in Sussex and a doomed love-match in Somerset, but the betting is still on Charles I. During his personal rule (1629-40) he had to resort to many unpopular taxes, including one on beer. 2 jacks = 1 jill (gill) = 1/4 pint (beer measurements). The crown breaking ... well, go figure.

1650 Humpty Dumpty

Humpty was in fact a powerful cannon based at Colchester Castle. During the Second English Civil War, the town was seized by the Royalists. The armies of parliament took a battering from Humpty, but destroyed this by attacking its tower, causing it to collapse. All Charles I's cavalry (horses) and infantry (soldiers) couldn't drag it back up again, and the castle was taken.

1660 Ring a ring of roses

Debate still about whether this really is a Black Death rhyme - but it’s nasty, so probably true. A ring of rose-shaped blotches around the neck indicated the plague’s presence, and violent sneezing the probable death of the victim. A pocketful of herbs was a supposed cure, and all fall down - well, in 1665 some 1,000 a day in London did and never got up again!

1660/1730 Rowley Powley/Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie

Charles II (called Old Rowley after a randy old male goat kept on the green at Whitehall, London) and George II enjoyed the high life and the ladies who went with it.

1690 Wee Willie Winkie/Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark

Both these rhymes refer to William of Orange, whose ‘invited invasion’ of England in 1688 was so rushed he arrived in London rather unkempt. Both were made by his enemies, the Jacobites. William, the man in the velvet gown/nightgown, was unfaithful to his wife and co-ruler Mary II, but was devastated by her death in 1694.

1690 Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top

Again William III. The wind was the ‘Protestant Wind’, which blew his fleet safely to Brixham in Devon and prevented his father-in-law James II’s fleet from stopping him. The cradle supported the infant James ‘III’, the Old Pretender, whose birth precipitated the crisis, and the bough breaking was the gradual loss of support for James as William advanced on London.

1730 There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

The woman was Caroline of Ansbach, shrewish wife of George II. Their 15 children presented quite a problem, and their large expenses were widely lampooned by the political cartoonists of the day. George’s grandson and successor George III bought a bigger London house - Buckingham Palace.

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