that Sir Charles Sedley wrote ‘There was a little man, And he woo’ed a little maid’
(1764), and Septimus Winner ‘Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?’ (1864); or,
among the few compositions written for children, that Jane Taylor wrote ‘Twinkle,
twinkle, little star’ (1806) and Sarah Josepha Hale ‘Mary had a little lamb’ (1830). ‘Wee
willie winkie’ was the first verse of a poem about a ‘waukrife laddie that winna fall asleep’,
written by William Miller, published in 1841, and immediately commandeered for
inclusion in nursery rhyme books, stripped of its Scotticisms and unacknowledged.
A large number of nursery rhymes have not been found recorded before the nineteenth
century, when folklore of every kind began to be taken seriously and investigated, but
haphazard references from the Middle Ages onwards confirm the existence of some of
them. A phrase of ‘Infir taris’ is recorded about 1450; ‘White bird featherless’ appears (in
Latin) in the tenth century; the germ of ‘Two legs sat on three legs’ may be seen in the
works of Bede. Agricola (b. 1492) learnt the German version of ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John’ from his parents. The whole of ‘I have a young sister far beyond the sea’ had
been set down by 1450. A French version of ‘Thirty days hath September’ belongs to the
thirteenth century. A game of ‘falling bridges’, on the lines of ‘London Bridge’, seems to
have been known to Meister Altswert in the late fourteenth century.
References in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to verses now known in the
nursery exist in some number. Almost certainly one in nine of the rhymes were known by
the mid-seventeenth century. At least a quarter, and very likely over half the rhymes are
more than 200 years old. However, before the emergence of nursery rhyme literature in
the eighteenth century, the glimpses we get of the existence of children’s lore are by the
way; a clergyman (1671), wishing to illustrate a theological point, quotes ‘A apple pie’; an
ageing lexicographer (1611), attempting to define the Italian word abomba, recalls part
of a rhyme from his childhood, ‘as we use to say Home againe home againe market is
done’; a pamphleteer (1606), reporting a murder trial, reveals that children regularly
repeated a Cock a doodle doo couplet; and a playwright (c.1559) introducing a clown
singing old songs (‘Tom a lin’ among them) makes him admit they were learnt from his
fond mother As I war wont in her lappe to sit.
It is the difficulty of dating the nursery rhymes precisely, and their anonymity, that
has made them so suitable for ingenious historical ‘interpretations’. As early as 1708 Dr
William King was speculating light-heartedly on the identity of Old King Cole in his
satirical Useful Transactions in Philosophy. Sixty years later the jesting editor of Mother
Goose’s Melody gave birth to a new set of propositions, still sometimes taken seriously
(for instance, that the old woman tossed in a blanket was composed in derision of Henry
V when, during the Hundred Years War, he conceived new designs against the French).
The game of fitting historical events to the rhymes has been especially popular in the
present century, and Katherine Elwes Thomas’s The Real Personages of Mother Goose,
published in 1930, provided shadow personalities for most of the best known rhyme
characters (best known in the present day, be it noted, but not likely to have been
known at the time of their supposed historical origin): thus Bopeep became Mary, Queen
of Scots; Jack Sprat, Charles I; Old Mother Hubbard, Cardinal Wolsey; Tommy Tucker,
also Cardinal Wolsey and so on. Amusing and often detailed ‘solutions’ to the rhymes
continue to be invented, usually in universities (for example, the equation of Humpty
Dumpty with Dr Chilling-worth’s tortoise-like siege machines of the ancient Roman
PLAYGROUND RHYMES AND THE ORAL TRADITION 175