Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes Read online

  Though perhaps most famous for writing the hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, Victorian folksong collector, vicar and all-round eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was obsessed with the moon and listed all kinds of references to the man supposed to inhabit it. In one version of the story, for instance, the man is carrying willow boughs. In another, he is a sheep stealer who entices sheep with cabbages. Baring-Gould also recounts how the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill derives from a Norse legend, in which the moon kidnaps two children, Hjuki and Bil. According to this theory, the figure that we see in the moon is Jack (Hjuki); Jill (Bil) is also there, but less easy to make out. The names ‘Hjuki’ and ‘Bil’ mean ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’, reflecting the waxing and waning of the moon.

  In China, the man in the moon is called Wu Kang; believed to have angered his teachers with his impatience, he was sent to the moon in punishment. In Japan, he is known as Gekkawo, the god of love, who ties lovers’ feet together with an invisible cord. Shamans believe they have the power to ascend to the moon and communicate with the old man – without explaining why none of them ever have, mind you. To the Inuit in Alaska the man in the moon is the keeper of all souls, while in Malaysia he is said to be sitting under a banyan tree plaiting a fishing line. A rat keeps chomping through the cord, but this is a good thing as the rat knows that if the old man ever finishes making his line then the world will end.

  Back here on earth, scientists have established that the moon is not perfectly round: on one side there is a vast bump in the surface and on the opposite side a giant crater. They believe that it must have been hit by a huge asteroid many millions of years ago. It is the resultant fractures and defects in the moon’s surface that have created the shadowing effect interpreted by our ancestors as the silhouette of an old man carrying home some firewood, with his little dog alongside.

  The Man of Thessaly

  THERE was a man of Thessaly,

  And he was wondrous wise;

  He jumped into a thorn bush

  And scratched out both his eyes.

  And when he saw his eyes were out,

  He danced with might and main,

  Then jumped into another bush

  And scratched them in again.

  Thessaly (Thessalia) is the central section of mainland Greece. Surrounded by high mountain ranges encircling a low plain, it borders Macedonia to the north, Sterea Ellada to the south and Epirus to the west, while its eastern shoreline is on the Aegean. The district was the legendary home of the ancient Greek gods and of the Centaurs.

  According to Greek legend, a mortal, Bellerophon (a man of Thessaly), was given the task of slaying the fire-breathing monster Chimera – a fearsome beast indeed, with its lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail. For this he used the services of an untamed flying horse called Pegasus and his first job was to subdue the winged steed. Before long, Pegasus was saddled and harnessed and Bellerophon was off to slay the monster.

  Assisted by his flying horse, the Greek won many more battles from the saddle, but as his fame grew, so did his arrogance. With so many victories notched up, he felt he deserved a place on Mount Olympus, home of the gods, and this presumption infuriated Zeus, the leader of the gods. As a lesson to the young pretender, Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, who threw Bellerophon from the saddle and into a thorn bush where he was blinded (he scratched out both his eyes). Destitute and crippled, Bellerophon spent the rest of his life stumbling around and seeking a way to reverse his cruel fate. Unlike the hero of the nursery rhyme – who comically scratched his eyes in again – he never did.

  Mary Had a Little Lamb

  MARY had a little lamb,

  Its fleece was white as snow;

  And everywhere that Mary went,

  The lamb was sure to go.

  It followed her to school one day,

  Which was against the rule;

  It made the children laugh and play

  To see a lamb at school.

  And so the teacher turned it out,

  But still it lingered near,

  And waited patiently about,

  Till Mary did appear.

  Why does the lamb love Mary so?

  The eager children cry;

  Why Mary loves the lamb, you know,

  The teacher did reply.

  The imagery and names used in this poem point to its having been constructed as a Christian homily for children. Such rhymes were extremely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so popular, in fact, that William Blake used the form as a template for his famous Songs of Innocence and of Experience, published in 1794 (think of ‘Little Lamb, who made thee’ and ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’). Mary, of course, is the name of Christ’s mother and one of the most commonly used images for Jesus is that of the Lamb of God, the fleece as white as snow a symbol of his goodness and purity. The poem can be read as a parable of Christ’s enduring love for mankind (Why does the lamb love Mary so?), that he is with Christians everywhere (And everywhere that Mary went, / The lamb was sure to go) and that the true Christian should love God and ignore other people’s mockery (It made the children laugh and play). In the style of these homilies, the teacher would have used Mary’s story explicitly to draw this improving moral, spelt out in the final verse. But there’s more to the story than that.

  To see how the poem came about, we need to go back to the early nineteenth century. It was reported in a 1902 edition of the New York Times Book Review that when Dr Lowell Mason introduced singing into Boston schools in 1827 he asked noted writers to contribute songs and rhymes, and one of the contributors was Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), who supplied ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.

  The rhyme proved so popular that many found it hard to believe that it wasn’t based on a true incident; indeed Mrs Hale had hinted as much. When in 1913 the New York Times ran an interview with Richard K. Powers of Lancaster, Massachusetts, who was celebrating his one hundred and eighth birthday, he talked about ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and commented: ‘Mary was my cousin, her full name was Mary Elizabeth Sawyer.’ Very conveniently, Mary Sawyer had written a complete account, at the age of eighty-eight. Here’s her story, in her own words – I’ve done

  a little pruning to keep her to the point because, as you’ll see, she’s not one for saying things briefly:

  One cold, bleak March morning, I went out with father to the barn and found a lamb that had been born in the night. It had been forsaken by its mother and through neglect was about dead from the cold and for want of food. I saw it had a little life and wanted to take it into the house, but father said no as it was about dead anyway and could only live for a short time. But I could not bear to see the poor little thing suffer so, and I teased until I got it into the house and then worked on mother’s sympathy.

  At first it could not swallow, and the catnip tea I had mother make, it could not take for a long time. I got the lamb warm first thing, which was done by wrapping her in an old garment and holding her in my arms beside the fireplace. All night long I nursed the lamb and at night it could swallow just a little.

  In the morning, much to my girlish delight, it could stand and then improved rapidly. It soon learned to drink milk, and from the time it could walk about it would follow me anywhere if I called it. It was a fast grower, as symmetrical a sheep who ever walked and its fleece was of the finest and whitest. Why, I used to take as much care of it as a mother would of a child. I used to wash it regularly, keep the burdocks out of its feet and comb and trim with bright coloured ribbons the wool on its forehead. And when that was being done, the lamb would hold down its head, shut its eyes and wait as patiently as could be.

  Then my brother Nate said: ‘Let’s take the lamb to school with us.’ When the schoolhouse was reached, the teacher had not arrived but a few scholars were there. I took her down to my seat – you know we had the old-fashioned, high-boarded seats back then. Well, I put the lamb under the seat on a blanket and she lay down just as quietl
y as could be.

  By and by, I had to get up to recite and left the lamb all right, but in a minute there was a clatter, clatter on the floor and I knew it was the pattering of the hooves of my lamb. Oh, how mortified I felt. The teacher laughed outright and of course all the children giggled. It was rare sport for them but I couldn’t find anything mirthful in the situation. I was too embarrassed and ashamed to even laugh or smile. I took the lamb out and put it in the shed until I was ready to go home at noon, when it followed me back.

  Visiting the school that forenoon was a young man called John Roulstone. He was very pleased at the school incident and the next day he rode across the fields on horseback, came to the little old schoolhouse and handed me a slip of paper which had written on it three verses, which are the original lines, but since then there have been other verses added by a Mrs Townsend.

  Personally, I have a few doubts. In the first place, if the lamb was so special to Mary, why didn’t it have a name? And if it did have a name, why didn’t she use it, or how had she forgotten it and yet remembered so many other small details so many years afterwards? Also, the rhyme was not published until 1830, fourteen years later. Would you still remember something a passing nine-year-old had written about your pet all those years ago?

  While there may be some dispute about whether Roulstone wrote any part of the poem, or whether Sarah Hale composed the whole thing, Massachusetts has nonetheless claimed the rhyme (and the consequent increase in their tourist industry), and both Mary Sawyer’s house in Sterling (until it burned down in 2007) and the small Redstone School have been preserved as a memorial. Today, in Sterling town centre, there stands a statue of a lamb in tribute to John Roulstone and displaying the first verse of the poem. Incidentally, Mary Sawyer’s little lamb, a ewe, apparently lived to be four years old and had three of her own baby lambs.

  Personally, I prefer this version of the rhyme:

  Mary had a little lamb,

  It really was a glutton;

  It quickly grew into a sheep

  And ended up as mutton.

  Or this one:

  Mary had a little lamb,

  But then she had a hunch

  When Dad came home with mint sauce,

  They were having lamb for lunch.

  Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

  MARY, Mary, quite contrary,

  How does your garden grow?

  With silver bells and cockle shells

  xAnd pretty maids all in a row.

  This nursery rhyme, with its innocent-sounding verse and the charming picture it evokes, has been happily recited by children for hundreds of years, none of whom are likely to have known about its strange, much darker origins. There are three theories about the background to the rhyme. It’s basically a case of choose your own Mary: either Mary I of England (1516-58), Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87), or, more controversially, the Virgin Mary.

  The first explanation refers to Mary I’s turbulent reign (see Three Blind Mice). When her father severed links with the Catholic Church to divorce her mother, it led to a deep rift between the king and his daughter. Mary was banished from court and sent away to live under virtual house arrest at the Palace of Beaulieu in the Essex farmlands.

  Henry’s son, King Edward VI (Mary’s younger half-brother), succeeded his father and pursued his Protestant reforms with even greater enthusiasm than Henry. As the first English king of the Protestant faith at the time of his coronation, Edward felt he had the work of God on his hands and even drafted the ‘Device to Alter the Succession’, removing his half-sisters, both the moderate Protestant Elizabeth and the devout Catholic Mary, from the line of succession in favour of his solid Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey. He knew that Mary, if allowed to succeed him, was going to be one contrary queen.

  Mary did succeed him, however (after the reign of Lady Jane, the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’, which was the shortest in English history), and her first action as queen was to order the release of the prominent Catholics Thomas Howard and Bishop Steven Gardiner from the Tower of London. Gardiner had once been a staunch ally of both her father and half-brother but, after refusing to renounce his faith, made an enemy of the powerful Thomas Cranmer. Mary then set about reversing all the religious legislation of her predecessors, plunging England into turmoil (Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary). Steven Gardiner was appointed Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor. Almost all other privy counsellors had opposed Mary’s accession to the throne and so Gardiner, whom she regarded as her only real supporter and confidant, was given the honour of crowning the new queen on 1 October 1553. Hence for garden in line 2 of the rhyme, we should read ‘Gardiner’. Another possible variation on this line associates gardens with graveyards – ‘How does your graveyard grow?’ – reflecting the growing number of dead Protestants in the aftermath of Mary’s accession. It has also been suggested that the ‘garden’ and all that grows in it may be a taunting reference to Mary’s empty womb – her failure to produce a Catholic heir (see Flour of England).

  During Mary’s bitter purge of the Protestants, Gardiner ordered imprisoned dissenters to be tortured using a gruesome array of devices, including instruments known as cockleshells for crushing a person’s genitals, thumbscrews called silver bells and rows of early guillotine-type devices used for beheading, known as ‘maidens’ or maids.

  The second theory identifies the Mary of the rhyme as Mary, Queen of Scots, who certainly had a chequered and somewhat contrary career herself (see Little Miss Muffet). When she sought refuge in England with her cousin Elizabeth, she was immediately put under house arrest. As a former queen, she lived in luxurious surroundings, but she was also under constant scrutiny. How does your garden grow? is therefore a sarcastically posed question in this context. She had exchanged her kingdom for a suite of rooms in various fortified stately homes, after all. Nonetheless, she remained a focus for all the closet Catholics (cockleshells and silver bells are symbols of Catholicism) and rebellious thinkers in Elizabethan England, and represented a constant danger to the throne. Despite this, Elizabeth was reluctant to deal harshly with a sister queen. In the end, however, Mary’s contrariness was her own downfall when she was implicated in a plot to depose Elizabeth. She was executed on 8 February 1587, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire.

  And, last but not least, this rhyme can also be read as an allegorical description of Roman Catholicism, central to which is worship of the Virgin Mary, one of whose titles is even hortus inclusus, the walled garden, celebrating her virginity. Although the second line of the rhyme could equally well be seen as a Protestant taunt, reminding the Catholics that their sphere of influence wasn’t actually growing any more. Cockleshells were worn on the hats of Catholic pilgrims, silver bells gave the summons to worship, and pretty maids all in a row were the nuns who forswore marriage in favour of duty to the Church. So, as I said, just pick your own Mary…

  Monday’s Child

  MONDAY’S child is fair of face,

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

  Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

  Thursday’s child has far to go.

  Friday’s child is loving and giving,

  Saturday’s child works hard for his living,

  And the child that is born on the Sabbath day

  Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

  The origins of this rhyme come from the ancient belief that each day of the week has something special about it. Even today that can be seen very clearly in the names of our weekdays. Sunday was the day of the sun and Monday of the moon. The rest of the week comes from the Norse gods: Tuesday is named after Tyr, the god of single combat; Wednesday after Woden, the one-eyed king of the gods; Thursday after Thor, the god of war; and Friday after Freya, the goddess of love. Saturday is the day of Saturn, the Roman god of farming. Depending on what day of the week you were born, you would come under the protection of its particular deity and hence your character would reflect theirs.

  This is reflected in the rhyme
: Saturday’s child works hard for his living, toiling in the fields or at a desk; Sunday’s child is sunny-natured (bonny and blithe and good and gay); Monday’s is good-looking (as proverbially fair as the moon); and Friday’s appropriately loving and giving.

  When it comes to the remaining days of the week, the rhyme goes its own way, however. Children born on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday would otherwise be a pretty feisty lot, if not downright bolshy and apt to pick a fight. They’d be dealing out woe rather than on the receiving end of it.

  On that very point, the rhyme has long bothered many who were born on a Wednesday. I have even read about one poor soul who convinced himself he was born on a Tuesday instead. And then there is the woman who booked a Caesarean on a Tuesday to make sure her daughter wasn’t saddled with the implications of a Wednesday birthday for the rest of her life. Well, I have good news for all of those whose lives have been ruined by finding out they were born on a Wednesday. Because the original publication of the rhyme in Harper’s Weekly on 17 September 1887 went like this:

  Monday’s child is fair of face,

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

  Wednesday’s child is loving and giving,

  Thursday’s child works hard for a living,

  Friday’s child is full of woe,

  Saturday’s child has far to go;

  But the child that is born on Sabbath-day

  Is bonny and happy and wise and gay.

  So that is good news, isn’t it? Unless you were born on a Friday, in which case I’m sorry about that.

  Needles and Pins

  NEEDLES and pins,

  Needles and pins,