nursery rhymes are one of the more enduring forms of oral culture. Although taken for granted, some of them are of considerable longevity, dating from the 17th cent. or earlier. The origins of these rhymes vary enormously. Some lie in riddles, others in singing games. Many, however, originated from printed ballads and song books, genres which were firmly established by 1700, while others can be traced back to plays or folk-songs.
It has been suggested that many of these rhymes originally referred to historical events or personalities, although attempts to prove such arguments in individual cases are rarely convincing. There is a risk of over-interpretation: the analysis of nursery rhymes in John Bettenden Ker's
An Essay on the Archaeology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes, published in three volumes between 1834 and 1840, is, according to one modern authority, ‘probably the most extraordinary example of misdirected labour in the history of English letters’ which has ‘given delight to students of mania ever since’. Sometimes historical origins to nursery rhymes can be traced: thus ‘Ring o' Roses’ may refer to the plague of the 17th cent., while ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ was almost certainly Frederick Augustus, son of George III, who led a less than successful campaign against the French in the Low Countries in 1793–5.
Most connections are hard to sustain. Thus there is no way of proving the early 18th-cent. notion that Old King Cole can be identified with the mythical founder of Colchester. The ‘fine lady’ riding her horse to Banbury Cross (a structure destroyed by the local puritans around 1600) has been variously identified as Queen Elizabeth I, Lady
Godiva (there is a version of the rhyme referring to Coventry Cross), and the traveller Celia Fiennes (1662–1741), ‘Fiennes’ being corrupted as ‘fine’. Such identifications are highly speculative.
It is far more profitable to use these rhymes, and the publications in which they were collected, as evidence of changing attitudes towards children and childhood. That so many of them had their origins in the ‘adult’ milieux of the theatre and the song book before coming to the nursery is suggestive of a certain relationship between the adult world and that of children, while the proliferation of nursery rhyme books around the middle of the 18th cent. supports the suggestion that new sensibilities towards children were developing then. This is a contentious area, and tracing changes in sensibility is always difficult. But the content and illustrations in books of nursery rhymes (the first of any substance published in 1744) would repay serious investigation, and would throw much illumination on the history of childhood.
J. A. Sharpe
