While the benefits of singing nursery rhymes with your child largely focus on their development, it is possible to learn a little history through nursery rhymes. Part of their magic is that no one really knows where they come from or what they mean. They have been around for hundreds of years, handed down from generation to generation verbally and changing over time. The only way to date them is as and when somebody wrote them down. We can date them as far back as the middle ages, but it’s very possible that people were singing them far earlier. While time will have swallowed many, some of the rhymes still sung in nurseries today are hundreds of years old.
Without radios, Spotify or memes, singing was commonplace for centuries. Flora Thompson recalls in her memoir of rural life in the late nineteenth century, Lark Rise to Candleford, “There was a good deal of outdoor singing in those days. Workmen sang at their jobs; men with horses and carts sang on the road … even the doctor”.
Many nursery rhymes we sing today were inspired by some historical event or person. From the cheerful imagery of The Muffin Man, about muffin sellers in Drury Lane, London, to the very horrible US rhyme Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, about a real-life (suspected) double-murderess whose motive was supposedly anger that her father didn’t move the family to a more fashionable part of town. Others were for educational purposes or even as cautionary tales.
The origins and history of some common nursery rhymes
Ring a Ring o’ Roses
While there are disputes, it is widely accepted that the history of this nursery rhyme began in times of plague. Sources differ on whether this was the Black Death of the 1300s or the Great Plague of 1665. The ‘ring o’ roses’ means the red lesions that victims got on their skin, the ‘pocketful of posies’ refers to the herbs people carried to protect them from the disease (and possibly dampen the smell), and at the end everybody sneezes and falls down dead.
Baa Baa Black Sheep
This is commonly thought to be a reference to the transatlantic slave trade, prompting modern versions such as Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep. Another likely theory suggests that it actually dates from the 1275 wool tax, called the Great Custom. In this, the farmer paid tax from each sack of wool to the Church and King Edward I. In the first printed version of 1744, there was ‘none for the little boy’. This was quite possibly a child labourer who did a lot of the work.
London’s Burning
The 1660s was an unfortunate decade for London. This rhyme refers to the Great Fire of London in 1666, started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. With houses being extremely close together and partly made of wood, the city was like kindling. Fire engines have been around in some form or other since at least Roman times. The outrageously rich Crassus used to buy people’s houses from them while they (the houses) were on fire for next to nothing, then get his private fire brigade to put it out.
Three Blind Mice
Queen Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary, was a devout Catholic and wanted the country to be too. In this rhyme, she is the farmer’s wife and the mice are three Protestants accused of plotting against her on religious grounds. She had them burnt at the stake.
Bloody Mary is also said to be the subject of Mary Mary Quite Contrary. The ‘garden’ is her cemetery of Protestants which she made grow with ‘silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row’, all sweet nicknames for torture instruments.
Pop Goes the Weasel
This refers to pawn shops in London’s East End in the 1850s. The ‘weasel’ is cockney rhyming slang for ‘coat’ (weasel and stoat). Its popping is as it disappears into the pawnshop since all the money’s been spent. The ‘eagle’ is actually The Eagle pub in Hoxton, London. It still stands to this day – no prizes for guessing where the money goes in there.
Bobby Shafto’s Gone to Sea
Robert Shaftoe was an eighteenth-century politician and heartthrob. Possibly anyway, but he definitely did break a woman’s heart by marrying someone else. Several different versions of the song have appeared, including one as part of his election campaign that did indeed call him ‘Bonny Bobby Shafto’. What isn’t clear is whether the song was written about him or just used by his supporters due to his having the same name as whoever the real bonny Bobby was.
There is certainly no evidence that he ever went to sea, the term meaning to become a sailor, in fact he went to Oxford University so he was hardly a rugged deckhand. This rhyme has nothing to do with My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, which is from nineteenth-century Scotland. Maybe sea air generally makes people bonny.
Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly
While this appears a gentle if flat song, there are actually ten verses, but you seldom hear more than the first and last. Originally dating from the seventeenth century, by the nineteenth, most of it had been omitted. The Victorians were notorious for editing any rudeness out of literature, past and contemporary. The full-length version tells a vague story about a man and a young maid (presumably as in maiden as in young woman, not her occupation necessarily) who lie down ‘where flowers grow’ together and start ‘making good sport’.
‘Dilly dilly’ didn’t really mean anything until the 2017 Budweiser advert, but was likely another Victorian edit since the original was ‘diddle diddle’.
Sing a Song of Sixpence
This one is interesting as it involves pirates. There are several legends as to where the rhyme came from but its use by pirates is legendary in itself. Real-life pirate Edward Teach, known to his friends and enemies as Blackbeard, supposedly used it as a code when recruiting new pirates. This happened a lot because piracy was pretty dangerous. In his version, ‘pocketful of rye’ is a reference to rye whisky, part of a pirate’s wages along with the sixpence and ‘blackbirds’ are pirates. Once you know this much it’s pretty self-explanatory.
Here we go Round the Mulberry Bush
A mulberry looks like a long blackberry, among other things. The history of this nursery rhyme is said to have come from HMP Wakefield, in Yorkshire, when prisoners were made to exercise by running round a mulberry bush in the exercise yard. They obviously weren’t running very fast if they could sing meanwhile.
Jack and Jill
While this is said to have been about the French King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s beheadings, another likely story is that it was about King Charles I’s reduction on alcohol volumes. These were called Jacks for half-pints and Gills for quarter-pints.
The benefits of nursery rhymes in the modern day
Even the oldest and most nonsensical of nursery rhymes is a useful part of children’s development today. Known benefits of singing nursery rhymes are that they aid with:
- Vocabulary
- Understanding what rhyming is
- Syllables and sentence structure
- Rhythm
- Memory
- Imagery
- Social routines
The language skills above are useful precursors to learning to read, so when your child comes home from nursery singing them, you can be safe in the knowledge that the rhymes are a valuable part of their education.
Music can also boost a child’s mental wellbeing, and babies and toddlers in particular tend to love being sung to by a parent.