Nursery Rhymes in European History
The term nursery rhyme seems to have been coined in the third decade of the 19th century as no reference has been found earlier than the July 1824 publication of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
These tales date back to Herodotus, Egyptian Papyrus and to the Chinese and Indians.
No one is really sure of Mother Goose was real or not. But those that believe she was have different ideas about who she was. Some of her identifies are:
1. The Queen of Sheba of biblical times.
2. Queen Bertha-mother of the medieval king Charlemagne-She was nicknamed Queen Goose-foot or "Goose-footed Queen". This appears to come from the fact that she was web footed. Queen Bertha died in 783.
3. Elizabeth Goose (maybe Vergoose, or Vertigoose) a woman who lived in colonial Boston who entertained her grandchildren with rhymes and chants she remembered from her childhood. It is said that Thomas Fleet, her son-in-law made a collection of these rhymes and put them in a book called "Songs for the Nursery" or " Mother Goose Melodies. However, no such book has ever been found or documented.
Mother Goose is always pictured as old but other features vary. Sometimes she is seen with a crooked nose and a very large chin. Others say she wears a tall hat, has a magic wand and rides on a goose. She might be a "witch" (in the folklore sense), broom, black cat and all. Sometimes she is shown holding an egg.
The first recording of the rhymes in printed form occurred in approximately 1760 when the book titled:
The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story Book Containing His Life and surprising adventures to which are added Tommy Thumb's Fables, with morals at the end and pretty stories that may be told or sung.
Also in 1760 the supposed book titled Mother Goose's Melody appeared attributed to the publisher John Newbery although no book with this imprint has ever been found. The earliest copies with his name on them appear in 1791 (after his death). John Newbery was the first man to make the publication of books for children a special line of business. His first known publication was A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744. Just for the record the actual size of these books was 2 1/4 by 3 inches
The individual that is most commonly given credit for collecting the rhymes and tales which became the Mother Goose stories is Charles Perrault. Charles Perrault was born in Paris on January 1628. Son of an upper-class burgeoise family, he attended the best schools and becomes a lawyer in 1651. He wrote Parallels between the Ancients and the Moderns, 1688-1697, which compared the authors of antiquity unfavorably to modern writers, and became a member of the French Academy in 1671. His Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose (1697) gave him great popularity and opened up a new literary genre: fairytale. He died in Paris on May 1703." As a note, to protect his reputation he did not publish this work under his name, but rather that of his son, Pierre.
Perrault chose his stories well, and he recorded them with wit and style. His narratives belong to a story-telling tradition that has been shared by countless generations. He did not invent these tales -- even in his day their plots were well known -- but he gave them literary legitimacy.
In the first publication there were only 8 tales:
THE EIGHT TALES
Sleeping Beauty in the Woods
Little Red Riding Hood
Blue Beard
The Master Cat (Puss in Boots)
The Fairies
Cinderella
Ricky with the Tuft
Little Thumb
BACKGROUND
Far from veiling their message with symbols, the storytellers of eighteenth century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality.
Many of the tales had their origins in the sermons of Medieval preachers who drew on oral traditions in order to illustrate moral arguments. Sleeping Beauty can be traced back to Arthurian tales of the 14th century. While Cinderella can be followed back across the ancient Silk Road to China in the early ninth century.
Men labored dawn to dusk, scratching the soil on scattered strips of land with plows like those of the Romans and hacking at their grain with primitive sickles, in order to leave enough stubble for communal grazing. Women married late-at age twenty-five to twenty seven-and gave birth to only five or six children, of which two or three survived to adulthood. Great masses of people lived in a state of chronic malnutrition, subsisting mainly on porridge made of bread and water with some occasional, home- grown vegetables thrown in. They ate meat only a few times a year, on feast days or after autumn slaughtering if they did not have enough silage to feed the livestock over the winter. They often failed to get the two pounds of bread (2,000 calories) a day that they needed to keep up their health, and so they had little protection against the combined effects of grain shortage and dis-ease. The population fluctuated between fifteen and twenty mil-lion, expanding to the limits of its productive capacity (an average density of forty souls per square kilometer, an average annual rate of forty births per thousand inhabitants), only to be devastated by demographic crises.
In the face of such difficulties, the "little people" survived by their wits. They hired themselves out as farm hands, spun and wove cloth in their cottages, did odd jobs, and took to the road, picking up work wherever they could find it. Many of them went under. Then they took to the road for good, drifting about with the flotsam and jetsam of France's "floating population", which included several million desperate souls by the 1780s. Except for the happy few on an artisanal tour de France and the occasional troupes of actors and mountebanks, life on the road meant ceaseless scavenging for food. The drifters raided chicken coops, milked untended cows, stole laundry drying on hedges, snipped off horses' tails (good for selling to upholsterers), and lacerated and disguised their bodies in order to pass as invalids wherever alms were being given out. They joined and deserted regiment after regiment and served as false recruits. They became smugglers, highwaymen, pickpockets, prostitutes. And in the end they surrendered in hopitaux, pestilential poor houses, or else crawled under a bush or a hay loft and died-
About 45 per cent of the Frenchmen born in the eighteenth century died before the age of ten. Few of the survivors reached adulthood before the death of at least one of their parents. And few parents reached the end of their procreative years, because death interrupted them. Terminated by death, not divorce, marriages lasted an average of fifteen years. In Crulai, one in five husbands lost his wife and then remarried. Stepmothers proliferated everywhere-far more so than stepfathers, as the remarriage rate among widows was one in ten. Stepchildren may not have been treated like Cinderella, but relations between siblings probably were harsh. A new child often meant the difference between poverty and indigence.
Stillborn children were often buried casually in anonymous collective graves. Infants were sometimes smothered by their parents in bed-a rather common accident, judging by Episcopal edicts forbidding parents to sleep with children who had not reached their first birthdays. Whole families crowded into one or two beds and surrounded themselves with livestock in order to keep warm. So children became participant observers of their parents' sexual activities. No one thought of them as innocent creatures or of childhood itself as a distinct phase of life, clearly distinguishable from adolescence, youth, and adulthood by special styles of dress and behavior. Children labored alongside their parents almost as soon as they could walk, and they joined the adult labor force as farm hands, servants, and apprentices as soon as they reached their teens.
The peasants of early modern France inhabited a world of stepmothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. That is why we need to reread Mother Goose.
An excerpt from one of the early tales reads:
Once upon a time there was a woodsman and his wife, who had seven children, all boys.They were very poor, and their seven children were a great inconvenience, because none was old enough to support himself..A very difficult year came and the family was so great that these poor folk resolved to get rid of their children." The very matter of fact manner in which this tale is told suggests how commonplace the death of children was and how easily parents could and did do in their children.
Parents frequently turned their children out on the road as beggars and thieves. Sometimes they ran away themselves, leaving the children to beg at home. And in some tales they just sell the children to the devil-wishful thinking.
While the same tales find their way from country to country the general tone undertakes several subtle changes. Most German tales place their emphasis on terror and fantasy as they feature supernatural powers, poetic passages and exotic locals and individuals. The French however place a greater emphasis on humor and domesticity. The tales are more realistic the their happenings and the humor tends to be earthy and bawdy. When the tales finally reach the Isle of Britain they take on an element of gaiety and whimsy.
The following opening to the English version of Jack the Giant Killer demonstrates this light humor:
Once upon a time-a very good time it was-when pigs were swine and dogs ate lime and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were thatched with pancakes, streets with plum pudding, and roasted pigs ran up and down the streets with knives and forks in their backs crying "Come and eat me!"
The early rhymes told of the human condition and did so in terms that the populace could readily identify with. Sometimes they laughed but we can read through their laughter and see the way live and society really were.
Note the following:
"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them broth without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed."
Like peasants continent wide she fed them broth even if she could not provide them with moldy bread. She vented her despair by whipping them. Historically the Old Woman is assumed to be Caroline the wife of King George II who had 8 children.
Other children fared equally poorly in both treatment and diet. Consider that most people cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme:
peas porridge hot,
peas porridge cold,
peas porridge in the pot
nine days old."
The children of the original age of Mother Goose frequently found clothing as hard to come by as food.
When I was a little girl
About seven years old
I hadn't a petticoat
To keep me from the cold.
But these children of Mother Goose were resourceful as witnessed by the continuing rhyme:
Then I went to Edinburgh
To bonnie burrows town,
And there I coft a petticoat,
A kirtle and a gown.
As life continued the children found things did not always workout according to plan;
There was an old woman had three sons
Jerry and James and John.
Jerry was hung and James was drowned,
John was lost and never was found,
So there was an end of her three sons,
Jerry and James and John.
We also get a glimpse of the rigor of the times through such rhymes as
See-saw Margery Daw
Sold her bed and lay on straw.
Was she not a dirty slut
To sell her bed and lie in dirt
This rhyme may have some other hidden meanings when told in Scotland. There the word DAW was used to refer to a lazy person and Margery in the 18th and 19th centuries was used exclusively as a name for the poor. But the word slut merely referred to an untidy person. Thus the name Margery Daw may simply have been a common term or untidy folks
Occasionally the rhymes make reference to an individual who managed to rise above the squalor most folk lived in. We might remember
Curly Locks, Curly Locks
Wilt thou me mine?
Thou shall not wash dishes
Nor yet feed the swine,
But sit on a cushion
And sew a fine seam,
And feed upon Strawberries,
Sugars, and Cream.
English legend has it that Curly Locks is none but the Stuart King Charles II who was know for his sewing skills.
Then we come to Elsie Marley, who at first reading seems to have it made:
Elsie Marley is grown so fine,
She won't get up to feed the swine,
But lies in bed 'til eight or nine.
Lazy Elsie Marley
Perhaps her means to her life of ease is revealed in the following verse:
Elsie Marley wore a fine hat,
But now she's gotten a velvet cap,
She may thank the Lambton lad for that
Do you ken Elsie Marley?
The greatest theme running throughout Mother Goose is one of poverty. Note that Old Mother Hubbard suffered through a "bare cupboard" while Little Tommy Tucker was forced to sing for his supper. Simple Simon is exposed for not having a penny---but this might be excusable since he was the village idiot and was not a threat to anyone.
One of the oldest rhymes, clearly dated back to the time of Elizabeth I when packs of beggars terrorized villages and preyed on the minds of lonely farmers in hamlets. Here the rhyme served as a warning to members of the village
Hark, hark,
The dogs to bark,
The beggars are coming to town;
Some in rags
And some in jags, (reference to jade and stolen goods)
And one in a velvet gown.
This rhyme seems to have been updated and used during the time of the Glorious Revolution and William III. Popular parlance referred to the Dutch as beggars and the velvet gown was applied to William himself as it seems to have been his favorite attire.
The on going poverty turned many Mother Goose characters into thieves and beggars as
Christmas is a coming;
The geese are getting fat.
Please to put a penny
In an old man's hat.
In addition to begging these waywards preyed on defenseless children
Then came a proud beggar
And said he would have her,
And stole by little moppet (doll) away.
Noting the lack of "honor among thieves" these wastrels even set upon each other.
There was a man and he had naught
And robbers came to rob him;
He crept up the chimney top,
And then they had him.
The rhymes contain plenty of nonsense and good humored fantasy. Still we hear the pulsing tone of despair even through the merriment:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy..
Sometimes they were just overwhelmed with misery:
There was an old woman
And nothing she had,
And so this old woman
Was said to be mad.
She'd nothing to eat,
She'd nothing to wear,
She'd nothing to lose,
She'd noting to fear
She'd nothing to ask
And nothing to give,
And when she did die
She'd nothing to leave.
One of the earliest rhymes that can be accurately dated comes from the time of Henry VIII when people were very focused on riddles. This rhyme reads:
There is a bird of great renown
Useful in city and town
None work like him can do
He's yellow, Black and green
A very pretty Bird I means
Yet he is both fierce and fell
I count him wise that can this tell
Answer is the bumble bee
Another riddle of popular tone
Black I am and much admired,
Men may seek me till they've tired;
I weary horse and weary man
Tell me this riddle of you can.
Answer coal
A rhyme of great age that has not changed and familiar to all
Bah, Bah, a black Sheep
Have you any Wool,
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full;
One for the master
And one for the dame
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.
This tale makes reference to the action of the wool trade and the division of the goods. The goods are divided among the Master (lord who owns the land) the dame (the shepherd's wife) and the "little boy" is the tax imposed on the trade in1275.
Archer's Instructions from the 100 Years War
One, two, buckle my shoe,
Three, four, lock the door,
Five, six, pick up sticks,
Seven, eight, lay them straight,
Nine, ten, a big fat hen,
Eleven, twelve, dig and delve,
Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting,
Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen.
Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting,
Nineteen, twenty, my bed's empty.
This instruction verse was popular during the Hundred Years War when it was used as a motivational tool in battle preparation.
The shoe buckling refers to the strapping of a special brace onto the foot to allow for stabilizing the 7 foot bow.
The locked door notes the closing of the shield wall behind the archers as they took their position in front of the heavily armed footmen.
Picking up stick references removing arrows from the quiver to make them more readily available.
Lay them straight was to place them, point stuck in the earth, feathers up, in front of the bowman.
The fat hen was clearly the easily seen target.
The remaining verses encouraged the men by reminding them of the booty which awaited them upon victory.
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The peasant who gets three wishes always turns his first thoughts to FOOD. Never with any imagination, he just takes the whole thing. If style is needed the most common touch in to note: "he even had napkins."
In French tales the hero wins in an earthly manner-they do not slay giants in a never never land or climb beanstalks. The villain lives in an ordinary house, like that of any wealthy farmer. It takes no leap of imagination to make these villains into bandits, millers, lords of the manor and the like.
Despite a considerable population of ghosts and goblins, the world of the English tales seem far more genial. Even giant killing takes place in a land of nod; thus the beginning of "Jack the Giant Killer" in one oral version:
Once upon a time-a very good time it was-when pigs were swine and dogs ate lime and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were thatched with pancakes, streets paved with plum puddings, and roasted pigs ran up and down the streets with knives and forks in their backs, crying ``come and eat me!" That was a good time for travellers.
In numbskull fashion, Jack trades the family cow for a few
Beans and then climbs his way to riches with the help of magic props'--fantastic beanstalk, a hen that lays golden eggs, and a talking harp. He is a kind of Simple Simon, like the Jacks and Jocks of a great many British tales. Brave but lazy, good-natured but thick-headed, he blunders into a happy ending in a happy-go-lucky world. His initial poverty and the ominous chorus of fee-fi-fo-fums from above the beanstalk do not spoil the atmosphere. Having overcome adversity, Jack earns his reward and emerges in the end looking like Little Jack Homer: "Oh what a good boy am I!"
The French giant killer belongs to another species. A pint-sized younger son, "extraordinarily sharp witted . . . always lively and alert," he joins the army with his nasty older brothers, who persuade the king to send him on the suicidal mission of stealing treasure from a giant. Like most French giants, this "bonhomme" does not live in a never-never land somewhere over the beanstalk. He is a local landlord, who plays the fiddle, quarrels with his wife, and invites the neighbors in for feasts of roasted little boys. Petit Jean does not merely run away with the treasure; he bamboozles the giant, torments him in his sleep, over salts his soup, and tricks his wife and daughter into baking themselves to death in an oven. Finally, the king assigns Petitt Jean the seemingly impossible task of capturing the giant himself. The little hero sets off disguised as a monarch and driving a coach loaded with a huge iron cage.
Elizabeth I comes in for some good natured jesting in the rhyme the Lady who Rode to Branbury with reference to her many "Progresses" Elizabeth may also be the queen of reference in the tale
Pussy cat, pussy car, where have you been?
I've been to London to look at the queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there?
I saw a little mouse under her chair.
This rhyme seems to be connected to many royal ladies. Elizabeth was widely known for her fear of mice and was reputed to have once stood upon a chair in Parliament when one ran by. Queen Victoria is certainly connected to the rhyme as Lord Ernle quoted it to her because his daughter wanted to know if she could save and have the mouse. Finally Queen Elizabeth II was asked by a little girl, the daughter of an RAF pilot, if the mouse had been caught. Fearing for the Queen's safety. When the child offered the Queen her cat Elizabeth thanked the child, and several days later sent the family a hundred pounds to pay for the mousers upkeep.
Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle
The Cow jumped over the moon
The little dog laughed to see such a sight
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.
There are many ideas about this rhyme, as well. The most popular idea is that it is a story about the stars. The dog is Sirius (known as the dog-star), the spoon could be the Big Dipper, the cat could be Leo the Lion, and the cow could symbolize Taurus the Bull.
One page (Courting Animals) says that this describes England's royal court. It was customary then to give the court silly names. The "cat" was a name dubbed to Elizabeth I because of the way she "fiddled" with the Cabinet ministers like the way cat plays with mice. The dish in this rhyme is the serving lady who ran away with the "spoon," the royal taster (in those days there was always a "taster" to test food to see if it was poisonous). Because the two ran away together they were captured and held in the Tower of London.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses (Cavaliers)
And all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
During the English Civil War (1642-49) "Humpty Dumpty" was the name for a powerful cannon. It was mounted on top the St. Mary's Wall Church in Colchester to defend the city against siege in the summer of 1648. Colchester was a Parliamentarian stronghold but had been captured by Royalists and they held it for 11 weeks) The church tower was hit by enemy fire and the top was blown off. Humpty Dumpty tumbled to the ground. The King's men tried to fix him to no avail.
Information located in the East Anglia Commons House, England. It is known that St. Mary's at the Wall was a stronghold during the siege.
Jack and Jill, went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
Jill, in earlier versions, used to be "Gill" and was depicted as a boy.
In the Norse Mythology the names were Hjuki and Bil. This rhyme deals with the markings on the full moon. The two boys went up a hill to draw water from a well and were captured by Mani, the God of the moon. When the moon is full two children with a bucket on a pole can be seen. This source and additional information about Mani comes from the Encylopedia Mythica under the Norse Mythology section.
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick!
This rhyme may have been a fortune-telling game. November 25, the feast day of St. Catherine was a popular day for weddings. After the wedding guests took turns jumping over a lighted candle. If the flame did not go out you'd have good luck for one year. If the flame was put out you'd have bad luck.
Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn.
The sheep's in the meadow
The cow's in the corn.
And where is the little boy who looks after the sheep?
Under the haystack, fast asleep.
Will you not wake him?
No. not I,
For if I do, he's sure to cry.
This rhyme is said to be about Charles II during his stay in France. It is a criticism of him whiling away time in exile (sleeping under the hay stack). While the sheep were in the meadow and the cow in the corn (both places the animals should not be.) This indicates a view that the country was in disarray-lacking a shepherd.