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

  When a man marries,

  His trouble begins.

  Needles and pins (or, as we more commonly say these days, ‘pins and needles’) is the tingling or pricking sensation you get when you’ve been sitting or lying in one position for too long and your foot or hand goes numb. There are no long-term effects – which makes it unlike marriage, the rhyme’s argument goes, where prickliness can last a lifetime.

  This is a traditional rhyme, thought to have been written about Henry VIII and his troublesome wives, although arguably it should be the other way round as we all know that it was his wives for whom trouble began when they married the king. Except for Catherine Parr, of course, who managed to outlive him.

  Needles and pins of a literal kind were one of the smaller (if still sharply pressing) problems Henry VIII encountered during his reign. At the time, most of them were made in the monasteries, so when their factories were closed down following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (see Little Jack Horner and Sing a Song of Sixpence), a huge vacuum was created in the marketplace. Pins and needles became very expensive and the king tried to rectify the problem by passing an act in 1543 encouraging industry of the day to manufacture more of them. The importance of pins, due to their relative scarcity, is reflected in this rhyme:

  See a pin and pick it up,

  All the day you’ll have good luck;

  See a pin and let it lay,

  Bad luck you’ll have all the day.

  Old King Cole

  OLD King Cole was a merry old soul,

  And a merry old soul was he;

  He called for his pipe,

  And he called for his bowl

  And he called for his fiddlers three.

  Every fiddler he had a fiddle

  And a very fine fiddle had he;

  Oh, there’s none so rare as can compare

  With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

  Some believe that the rhyme must have been written after the introduction of tobacco to Europe in 1564. But it goes back much further, to the early part of the first millennium where the pipe was actually much more likely to have been the double aulos, an ancient reed instrument, and the bowl a type of drum favoured by wandering minstrels and entertainers. In addition, the word coel is the Gaelic word for ‘music’, so could Old King Cole be the ‘Old King of Music’, the venerable leader of a band, playing the pipe and drum with his fiddlers three? Or could he have been a real person? Digging further, we find three possible candidates for him.

  The first, Coel Godhebog (otherwise known as Coel the Magnificent), was Lord of Colchester (believed to be Latin for ‘Coel’s Fort’) and lived in the third century ad. This

  was the period of the Roman occupation of Britain and Coel was a decurion, responsible for running local affairs. The emperor of the western Roman Empire at the time was Flavius Valerius Constantius (250-306), and legend has it that he went to Britain in 296 to consolidate Roman interests. Here he fell in love with Coel Godhebog’s daughter, Helena, and became Coel’s successor, their son growing up to become Constantine the Great. While it is entirely possible that Constantius fell in love with Coel’s daughter, it is unlikely she was Constantine the Great’s mother. Especially as Constantine was actually born twenty years earlier, around 272, in another part of the empire – his mother was indeed a Helena (famed for her piety, she later became St Helena), but a Bithynian rather than a Briton. However, the Romans had certainly perfected the art of a party by the end of the third century, with or without pipes and fiddles, so was Coel the Magnificent the real Old King Cole?

  Or was it Coel Hen (350-420), also known as Coel the Old as he lived for seventy years (an unusually long time in the days when there was always a war to fight or a disease to catch)? Coel the Old was also Lord of Colchester, at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire. In fact, Hen is thought to have been the final decurion as the last of the Romans fled the country under pressure from the barbarians. Hen, though, remained and fought long battles in the north of England against the Picts and the Scots.

  Finally, we have his son, St Ceneu ap Coel, who was born in 382. He also remained in Britain and is thought to have been elevated to saintly status after defending Christianity against the pagan onslaught. Hugely popular, St Ceneu later became king of northern Britain. In his History of the Kings of Britain (1136), Geoffrey of Monmouth lists St Ceneu as a guest at the coronation of King Arthwys, his grandson. In the past, many historians have believed that Arthwys, born around 455 and who became the king of southern Wales, was the inspiration for the legend of King Arthur. So which King Cole is the rhyme about, the Magnificent, the Old or the Saint? Or could it be an amalgam of all three?

  A thousand years later, the first of the Tudor kings, Henry VII (1457-1509), insisted he descended from King Cole (not specifying which one) in order to strengthen his own claim to the throne, but this claim is almost impossible to prove as most of the information on record about England’s ancient kings was gathered many centuries after the event and hence based on legend, fable and handed-down stories.

  Old Mother Hubbard

  OLD Mother Hubbard

  Went to the cupboard

  To fetch her poor dog a bone.

  But when she got there

  The cupboard was bare

  And so the poor dog had none.

  She went to the fishmonger’s

  To buy him some fish,

  But when she came back

  He was licking the dish.

  She went to the grocer’s

  To buy him some fruit,

  But when she came back

  He was playing the flute.

  She went to the cobbler’s

  To buy him some shoes,

  But when she came back

  He was reading the news.

  For the origins of this rhyme we need to go back to the sixteenth century, to a prominent figure from this unique period in history, when religious and political sagas dominated the English way of life. Criticizing the rich and powerful – especially the monarch and the Church – was a dangerous pastime that could lead at best to a day in the stocks, where ill-wishers would come along and pelt you with stones or rotten vegetables, and at worst to being hanged, drawn and quartered or burned alive. Anonymously penned rhymes in the guise of nonsense verse for children therefore provided a safe means of letting off steam while also relaying vital information. Some historians believe Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is meant to represent the Roman Catholic Church, with all the power and resources that particular organization had at its disposal, while the Old Mother is Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1470-1530), one of the most important and powerful churchmen of the sixteenth century, and at one time a close ally of King Henry VIII.

  According to this interpretation, when Henry asked for a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon (see Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary and Three Blind Mice), he sent Old Mother Hubbard (Cardinal Wolsey) to the Vatican (the cupboard) to obtain a bone (the divorce scroll) for the dog (the king himself). But, on finding that the cupboard was bare (the Vatican wasn’t going to sanction a divorce), Wolsey fell from favour with the king, who took his newly built palace at Hampton Court from him and rejected the Catholic Church into the bargain. The poor dog might not have got his bone but he became definitely much richer in the process.

  But how do verses three, four and five fit into all this? For that we need to dig a little further into the history of the rhyme. The earliest publication of the poem was in 1790, as ‘The Adventures of Mother Hubbard and her Dog’, credited to one Sarah Catherine Martin (1768-1826), a British writer responsible for twelve other popular works on Mother Hubbard. It is claimed that a real Mrs Hubbard was housekeeper at Kitley House, Yealmpton, in south Devon where Sarah was a regular guest. But this is just hearsay, unfortunately, as there is no mention of either Sarah Martin or Mrs Hubbard in any of the very detailed literature about Kitley. The old Mother Hubbard, in this case, appears to be entirely fictitious.

  I
n any case, the earliest reference to ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ dates back much further, to 1591, making it entirely possible that both suggested origins could be true. After all, the complete nursery rhyme does give the impression of being two separate poems welded together. The first two verses are very different from the remaining section in terms of construction (four lines instead of three), and the vocabulary of the first part seems simpler and older in style. So there is a strong indication that the first two verses were written at a much earlier date than the rest and could quite easily be about Henry VIII and Wolsey, while the remaining stanzas could have been added by Sarah Martin to give more colour to her series of adventures involving her favourite old lady and dog. At least, that is what I conclude from all this.

  Oranges and Lemons

  ORANGES and lemons,

  Say the bells of St Clement’s;

  You owe me five farthings,

  Say the bells of St Martin’s;

  When will you pay me?

  Say the bells of Old Bailey;

  When I grow rich,

  Say the bells of Shoreditch;

  When will that be?

  Say the bells of Stepney;

  I do not know,

  Says the great bell of Bow;

  Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  And here comes a chopper –

  To chop off your head!

  Chip chop, chip chop –

  The last one is dead!

  This rhyme is usually sung by children as a party game. Two will start the game off by facing each other and holding hands to form an archway, or ‘chopper’. The others will then form a line and as they all sing the rhyme they pass under the arch. On the last word, the ‘chopper’ will catch the child passing though and he or she is then out of the game. Interestingly, this points towards the grim events that underlie this seemingly innocuous rhyme. But first a bit of history.

  While the earliest traceable written record of the rhyme dates to around 1745, there is a dance tune called ‘Oringes and Lemons’ listed in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, first published in 1665. In the nursery rhyme, the bells are all those of London churches. Although some of the churches were damaged by the Great Fire of London in 1666, all of them still stand to this day. The rhyme plots a journey through London, using the churches as landmarks. Let’s have a look at each in turn:

  St Clement’s Church

  London has two St Clement’s vying to be the one mentioned in the verse. It could be St Clement’s Church in Eastcheap, on the grounds that it is located close to the docks (St Clement was the Roman patron saint of sailors) where cargos of citrus fruit (oranges and lemons) often arrived from the Mediterranean. It is recorded that the bells of St Clement’s would ring as each ship arrived at the dockside, filled to the gunwales with fruit. The church of St Clement Danes in Westminster would appear to have an equal claim, however, also being situated near the docks. According to Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), porters, having collected their fruit from the wharf, would use the churchyard as a shortcut and paid a toll to the church in return for carrying their oranges and lemons to Clare Market nearby. St Clement Danes takes this claim seriously enough to play the Oranges and Lemons’ melody on its bells on a daily basis and each year holds a special ‘oranges and lemons’ service.

  Sadly, though both churches were certainly located in the fruit-trading areas of old London Town, there is little convincing evidence supporting either claim. In any case, all this citrus fruit is really a cover for a much bitterer cargo: condemned men were also unloaded at the docks and then taken through the streets of London to a public execution, the bells of the particular churches ringing their death knell. All of which makes St Clement’s in Eastcheap the most likely candidate for the first bell a prisoner would hear.

  St Martin’s Church

  The first record of the bells of the church of St Martin Orgar dates from 1469, when parish accounts note an expense for ‘a rope for ye sauns bell, mending the bell, mending the wheel and a socket for the rope to run in’. The church is located very close to St Clement’s at Martin Lane in the City of London, an area formerly well known for its pawnshops and money lenders. Martin Lane is also only yards from Pudding Lane where, famously, the Great Fire started.

  A farthing was a fourth of a penny (a ‘fourthing’, hence ‘farthing’), although back in those days five farthings was quite a reasonable sum of money. Returning to our condemned man, it’s possible that those who knew him would make a last-ditch attempt to get their money back (You owe me five farthings).

  Church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (Old Bailey)

  St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the largest parish church in the City of London, is located on Holborn Viaduct, directly opposite the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in England. The clerk of the church, known as the Bellman, was given the responsibility of ringing a hand bell outside the condemned cells at midnight before an execution was due to be carried out, and the following rhyme would be recited through the locked door:

  All you that in the condemned hole do lie,

  Prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die;

  Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near

  That you before the Almighty must appear;

  Examine well yourselves and in time repent

  That you may not to eternal flames be sent;

  And when St Sepulchre’s Bell in the morning tolls,

  The Lord above have mercy upon your souls.

  Famous as one of the ‘Cockney bells’, the great bell of Old Bailey would traditionally be rung to mark the execution of a prisoner at the gallows of the nearby Newgate Gaol. The payment of the debt the prisoner is about to make (When will you pay me?) is not in money.

  Shoreditch Church

  The bells of Shoreditch are located in the belfry of St Leonard’s Church on Kingsland Road. Shoreditch Church, as it is better known, was in an area outside the city wall noted for its extreme poverty and lawlessness. When I grow rich would have sounded particularly ironic from the bells of Shoreditch and from a man on his way to execution.

  Church of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney

  The St Dunstan and All Saints Church in Stepney was originally built in ad 952 by Dunstan (909-88), London’s favourite saint from the Middle Ages. He was a local boy who became Bishop of London, then Archbishop of Canterbury and then (posthumously, of course) a saint. The bells of Stepney were famous for their clear sound and, here, drive the point further home: When will that be? It’s a question the condemned man can no longer answer.

  Church of St Mary-le-Bow

  Known locally as Bow Church, the site of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside has had a church upon it since 1080. It is a place long associated with death. In 1340, the population of London was 50,000 but in 1348 the Black Death claimed over 17,000 lives. During this time, the bells at St Mary-le-Bow rang out the curfew each day to keep the ever-diminishing population of the City within its walls and therefore under quarantine. Here the bell provides a pessimistic answer – I do not know – to the question posed by the bells of the previous church.

  Incidentally, the use of Bow bells as a curfew leads us to an explanation of how ‘Cockney’ is defined. Each day the bells would ring out at nine in the evening, the signal for everybody to be off the streets and the non-residents away from the City limits. From then onwards it was decided that anybody who could actually hear the bells was an inhabitant of the City, while those who lived in districts where they could not hear the bells were deemed non-residents and not subject to the curfew. This has led to the celebrated claim that anybody considered to be a real Londoner, or Cockney, must have been born within the sound of the Bow bells in Cheapside and not in Bow (a separate district of London), as many East Enders insist.

  The Bow bells are also said to be responsible for Richard (Dick) Whittington (1354-1423) ‘turning’ back to London and to great prosperity and success – eventually becoming London’s most famo
us Lord Mayor (see Turn Again, Whittington). The message the bells are sending the prisoner in this rhyme is a rather bleaker one, however. They mark the end of his journey (Here comes the candle to light you to bed) and they aren’t holding out much hope (Here comes the chopper to chop off your head). It’s rather a chilling discovery that the game we all blithely played as children is in fact a macabre re-enactment of a medieval execution.

  The Owl and the Pussycat

  THE Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat;

  They took some honey, and plenty of money,

  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above

  And sang to a small guitar,

  ‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

  What a beautiful Pussy you are,

  You are,

  You are!

  What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

  Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl,

  How charmingly sweet you sing!

  O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

  But what shall we do for a ring?’

  They sailed away, for a year and a day

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

  And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

  With a ring at the end of his nose,

  His nose,

  His nose,

  With a ring at the end of his nose.

  ‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

  Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

  So they took it away, and were married next day

  By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

  They dined on mince and slices of quince,