We all remember singing nursery rhymes as children, enjoying their catchy, singable tunes and often the actions or games that go with them. These ditties are often the first music we learn, and the words stick with us long after childhood.
Yet if you stop to think about what you’ve actually been singing, you might well be baffled, surprised or even shocked. Because many of these popular rhymes tell dark stories, offering coded snapshots of the trials and tribulations of the past.
Darkest nursery rhymes
Ring a Ring O’Roses
A nursery rhyme in which children stand in a circle merrily singing about death sounds like something out of a horror film. But real life is often stranger than fiction, and Ring a Ring O’Roses is one of the most popular modern nursery rhymes.
It’s common wisdom that this cheery number is in fact about the Great Plague of London (1665) or the Black Death (late 1340s). Consider the so-called evidence: the roses are a rosy rash associated with the deadly disease; the posies refer to the herbs people hoped might cure them, and the final line, ‘we all fall down’, is, of course, the bitter end.
- Just how deadly was the Black Death?
- Plague, pox and pain: The deadliest medieval diseases that changed history forever
Not everyone agrees on this interpretation, however, not least because the rash, posies and sneezing aren’t associated with the plague. And according to the authors of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhyme, this version wasn’t known before the 20th century.
Alternatives include confessions of love and curtseys rather than sneezing and death. There’s even a sequel which ends with everyone getting up again. Still, for some reason, it’s the darker version that we all remember.
Sing a song of sixpence
People’s ideas of fun were different back in the 16th century. One such entertainment was to put live birds into a pie before serving it to the table. When the pie was cut into, the birds would fly out, presumably desperate to escape.
There’s even a recipe for this unusual dish in an Italian cookery book of 1549, while one account in England to describes the birds causing a ‘diverting Hurley-Burley amongst the Guests in the Dark’. And, although there are many interpretations of Sing a song of sixpence, in which ‘four and twenty blackbirds’ are baked in pie and placed before the king, scholars believe it was probably inspired by this historical amusement.
London Bridge is Falling Down
London Bridge is Falling Down may well ‘preserve the memory of a dark and terrible rite of past times’, claims The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhyme. Its subject is London Bridge’s demise and the attempts to rebuild it, but it’s not known exactly which event is being discussed. The verses could refer to the damage sustained by London Bridge during a fire of 1663 and the Great Fire of London of 1666.
Others believe the origins could be much older, and that the song refers to the Viking destruction of London Bridge by Olaf II of Norway in 1014. And there’s an even darker twist. Some have suggested the song refers to children being buried in the foundations of the bridge, as a superstitious sacrifice to ensure the bridge stood strong.
Oranges and Lemons
The last two lines of Oranges and Lemons take a truly macabre turn. What could be more menacing than hearing someone chanting: ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’ Do they refer to child sacrifice, as some have suggested. Or perhaps to the unlucky wives of King Henry VIII?
A third theory suggests that this song is about the days of public executions. Prisoners would be led along the streets of London to their deaths, accompanied by the tolling of bells from the various churches named in the rhyme. But just to confuse matters, the final couplet wasn’t part of the original version. These ominous words are first recorded in the 1840s.
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
A medieval wool tax might seem an unlikely topic for toddlers, but Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is about just that. In 1275, King Edward I slapped an export tax onto wool, meaning that for every bag a farmer sold, one third of the cost would go to the king, another to the church and only the final third to the farmer.
King, church, farmer become the master, dame and little boy of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. As you might imagine, this high tax didn’t go down too well with the farmers – and it’s thought this nursery rhyme could be a protest.
Unlike many other rhymes, the words for this popular number have remained relatively unchanged over the centuries. It’s sung to the old French tune ‘Ah vous dirai je’, which is also the basis for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.
Little Bo Peep
Poor Bo Peep doesn’t even get as far as selling the wool, as she has lost all her sheep. It’s hard to trace the history of this popular nursery rhyme, which first appeared in print in the 19th century. On the surface, it’s a simple albeit gruesome story about a shepherdess who goes in search of her missing flock only to find their tails hanging from a tree.
But does it have a deeper meaning? Some writers have noted that, much earlier, in the 14th century, ‘to play bo peep’ referred to being punished in a pillory. More recently author Albert Jack, in Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes, has suggested that the song is actually about smuggling in the Sussex village of St Leonards, where the Bo Peep Public House was a smuggler’s den.
He suggests Little Bo Peep represents the customs men, the sheep are the smugglers, and the tails are the illicit goods, like brandy or rum.
Three Blind Mice
The brutality of this popular rhyme is no secret. It is, after all, the tale of a farmer’s wife running after blind mice in order to cut off their tails. Three Blind Mice first appear in print in 1609, in a book titled Deuteromelia or The Seconde part of Musicks melodie.
Both its words and music survived unchanged over the centuries, but perhaps there more to this well-known round than first meets the eye. Could the mice represent three Protestant bishops blinded and executed by Queen Mary I – Bloody Mary – who was Catholic and stopped at nothing to make England Catholic again? It’s a theory that could suggest an even darker underlying message.
Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
Mary, Mary Quite Contrary initially conjures an image of a lady lovingly tending the flowers in her garden. Even when you know that Mary, Queen of Scots might have been the inspiration for the rhyme, the lines could be innocently describing her ladies-in-waiting (the ‘pretty maids’) and a decoration on a dress she wore (‘cockle shells’).
But factor in the possibility that it could be about Mary I and her torturing of protestants, and a shadow of suspicion falls over this rhyme. That delightful garden could have been grown on the graveyard of protestant martyrs; the ‘silver bells’ were thumbscrews, and those innocent cockle shells were tools of torture that could make the lives of protestant men very uncomfortable.
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
If going round a mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning sounds like a winter idyll, then one possible origin for this rhyme quickly quashes such notions. It’s been suggested that the mulberry tree in question was one found at HMP Wakefield in Yorkshire, which was built as a house of correction in 1594. In later centuries, it’s thought female prisoners danced round the tree and sang the rhyme to entertain their children or to keep warm.
The tree died in 2017 from beetle infestation and canker and was removed in 2019. Cuttings from the original tree have since been planted at the prison and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The prison’s crest is a mulberry and a nearby road has been called Mulberry Way.
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty is a riddle wrapped up in a rhyme. What, after a fall, is unable to be put back together again? The answer: an egg. That’s what gives us the image of the round-faced, smiling Humpty Dumpty. And this common nursery rhyme has equivalents all across Europe, from Boule, boule in France to Hillerin-Lillerin in Finland.
Case closed, surely. Well, not necessarily. Some believe that Humpty Dumpty was the name for a cannon placed on the walls of Colchester in the 17th century. When the town, which had been occupied by Royalists, was under siege in 1648, a shot from the parliamentarians damaged the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty. It fell to the ground and was so heavy that even all the Royalists (‘all the King’s men’) couldn’t haul the cannon back to a useful spot.
