“There is no human culture that has not invented some form of rhyming ditties for its children,” writes Clemency Burton-Hill for the BBC. Often called nursery rhymes, variations on these poetical and sometimes nonsensical verses for children have been with us since time immemorial, but the earliest printed English versions date from the mid-18th century, with the publication of books such as Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Song Book and Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book in 1744.
In 1780, Thomas Carnan published Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle, the earliest book to use the name Mother Goose, which has since become synonymous with nursery rhymes. However, nursery rhymes had existed in various forms for generations before they were written down. “In largely illiterate societies,” Burton-Hill writes, “the catchy sing-song melodies helped people remember the stories and, crucially, pass them on to the next generation. Whatever else they may be, nursery rhymes are a triumph of the power of oral history.”
But what about those stories? “A lot of children’s literature has a very dark origin,” Seth Lerer, Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego told Today. “Nursery rhymes are part of long-standing traditions of parody and a popular political resistance to high culture and royalty.”
This means that seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes may have dark or sinister hidden meanings—or they might once have. While tracing the true origins of oral history is virtually impossible, many modern nursery rhymes have apparent ties to often grim or controversial moments in history, even if those ties are sometimes disputed by historians.
“Nursery rhymes are part of oral traditions that are always in movement,” Robert Darnton, University Librarian at Harvard University told Today, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint the specific origins of a given rhyme. Yet, many rhymes that you may remember from your own childhood could have some unexpected historical underpinnings that will surprise you…
“Ring Around the Rosie”
Perhaps the most frequently-cited “secret origin” of a nursery rhyme is the claim that “Ring a Ring o’ Roses,” better known in the modern world as “Ring Around the Rosie,” is about the bubonic plague, which felled almost a quarter of London’s population in 1665—or the earlier Black Death that ravaged Europe in the middle of the 14th century, killing as much as half the continent. In this account, the buboes of the plague were the “roses” in question, “the stench of which then needed concealing with a ‘pocket full of posies.’” The part where “we all fall down” probably doesn’t need explaining.
However, many linguists and historians disagree with this origin, pointing out that the rhyme did not see its first publication until long after the plagues. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes also indicates that “foreign and nineteenth-century versions seem to show that the fall was originally a curtsy,” while also pointing out that several versions of the rhyme include a verse where the participants “all get up again.”
“Rock-a-bye Baby”
Was one of the best-known lullabies in the world originally a threat of assassination targeting an infant prince? “The baby in question is supposed to be the son of King James II of England,” according to the BBC, “but was widely believed to be another man’s child, smuggled into the birthing room to ensure a Roman Catholic heir.” This immediately preceded the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which James II was deposed and replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III of Orange.
Once again, however, authorship of the original verses remains unclear, and a wide variety of different iterations make the origin of the poem as a “lampoon on the British royal line” less definitive. “The authorship has been attributed to a Pilgrim youth who went over in the Mayflower and who was influenced by the way the Red Indian hung his birch-bark cradle over the branch of a tree,” writes the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, citing only one of many putative origins for the popular rhyme that have nothing to do with James II.
“Frere Jacques”
Usually sung in a round, this French nursery rhyme has also become popular in English-speaking countries since World War I, where it is sometimes translated to “Brother John” and other times sung in its original French. The earliest known manuscript version of the rhyme dates back to around 1780, and “Frere Jacques” has found its way into a symphony by Mahler, a Beatles song, slogans chanted by demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, and even the name of a type of cheese.
The rhyme describes a friar who is supposed to ring the bell for matins but has overslept. As with many nursery rhymes, it is impossible to determine the precise origins of “Frere Jacques,” but it has been argued that the rhyme may have been a lampoon of Dominican friars. The French name Jacques would translate to James or Jacob, and the Dominicans are known in France as the Jacobin order, where they are sometimes mocked for their “sloth and comfortable lifestyle.”
“Mary Had a Little Lamb”
Despite the putative origins of many nursery rhymes, there are only a few that can be definitively linked to a specific historical event. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is one of these, owing perhaps partially to its relatively recent vintage, as it was first published in America in 1830.
A 1985 biography of Sarah Josepha Hale describes the event which gave rise to the poem. At the time, Hale was teaching at a small school in New Hampshire, when one of her young students came to class followed by her pet lamb. “The visitor was far too distracting to be permitted to remain in the building and so Sarah ‘turned him out.’ The lamb stayed nearby till school was dismissed and then ran up to Mary looking for attention and protection.”
In 1876, a 70-year-old Mary Elizabeth Tyler came forward as the “Mary” from the rhyme, saying that she had brought her lamb to school that day on the urging of her brother. Her account led to an authorship controversy around the rhyme itself, but further cemented the notion that “Mary Had a Little Lamb” possessed a rather prosaic but altogether real point of origin.
“London Bridge”
“Few songs stir the imagination more deeply, evoking pictures both of a mysterious bridge which must ceaselessly be rebuilt, and of children singing lightheartedly as they play a game upon which there still rests an element of fear.” So writes the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes about “London Bridge,” asserting that it is one of the few nursery rhymes, “perhaps the only one, in which there is justification for suggesting that it preserves the memory of a dark and terrible rite of past times…”
Though “a game of ‘falling bridges,’ on the lines of ‘London Bridge,’ seems to have been known to Meister Altswert,” a German minstrel active in the second half of the 14th century, suggesting that the game and rhyme of “London Bridge” are older than the bridge itself, the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes nonetheless attests that “London Bridge” may really be about an age-old process of interring sacrifices – sometimes children – in the foundations of certain buildings, especially bridges, and that “London Bridge itself is not without a tainted reputation, for there is in the capital a tradition that the stones of this great bridge, too, were once bespattered with the blood of little children.”
