Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. Eckenstein Lina
Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it,
But the devil a penny was there in it,
Except the binding round it.
This is said to preserve the names of two celebrated courtesans of the reign of Charles II (1892, p. 330).
The first name in the following rhyme is that of a famous border hero who was hanged between 1529 and 1530: —
Johnny Armstrong killed a calf;
Peter Henderson got half;
Willy Wilkinson got the head, —
Ring the bell, the calf is dead.
Among the pieces collected by Halliwell, and told in cumulative form, one begins and ends with the following line, which recurs at the end of every verse: —
John Ball shot them all.
Halliwell is of opinion that this may refer to the priest who took a prominent part in the rebellion at the time of Richard II, and who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1381.
But a historical name does not necessarily indicate the date of a rhyme. For a popular name is sometimes substituted for one that has fallen into contempt or obscurity. Moreover, a name may originally have indicated a person other than the one with whom it has come to be associated.
A familiar nursery song printed in the collection of c. 1783, and extant in several variants, is as follows: —
When good King Arthur rul'd the land,
He was a goodly king,
He stole three pecks of barley meal
To make a bag pudding.
A bag pudding the king did make
And stuff'd it well with plumbs,
And in it put great lumps of fat,
As big as my two thumbs.
The king and queen did eat thereof,
And noblemen beside,
And what they could not eat that night
The queen next morning fry'd.
Mr. Chappell, as cited by Halliwell, considered that this version is not the correct one, but the one which begins: —
King Stephen was a worthy king
As ancient bards do sing…
The same story related in one verse only, and in simpler form, connects it with Queen Elizabeth, in a version recovered in Berkshire.
Our good Quane Bess, she maayde a pudden,
An stuffed un well o' plumes;
And in she put gurt dabs o' vat,
As big as my two thumbs.
On the face of it the last variant appears to be the oldest.
An interesting example of a change of name, and of the changing meaning of a name, is afforded by the nursery song that is told of King Arthur, and mutatis mutandis of Old King Cole. The poem of King Arthur is as follows: —
When Arthur first in Court began
To wear long hanging sleeves,
He entertained three serving men
And all of them were thieves.
The first he was an Irishman,
The second was a Scot,
The third he was a Welshman,
And all were knaves, I wot.
The Irishman loved usquebaugh,
The Scot loved ale called blue-cap.
The Welshman he loved toasted cheese,
And made his mouth like a mouse-trap.
Usquebaugh burnt the Irishman,
The Scot was drowned in ale,
The Welshman had liked to be choked by a mouse,
But he pulled it out by the tail.
In this form the piece is designated as a glee, and is printed in the New Lyric by Badcock of about 1720, which contains "the best songs now in vogue."
In the nursery collection of Halliwell of 1842 there is a parallel piece to this which stands as follows: —
Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
Old King Cole he sat in his hole,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
The first he was a miller,
The second he was a weaver,
The third he was a tailor,
And all were rogues together.
The miller he stole corn,
The weaver he stole yarn,
The little tailor stole broadcloth
To keep these three rogues warm.
The miller was drowned in his dam,
The weaver was hung in his loom,
The devil ran away with the little tailor
With the broadcloth under his arm.
Chappell printed the words of the song of Old King Cole in several variations, and pointed out that The Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading, or the Six Worthie Yeomen of the West of 1632, contains the legend of one Cole, a cloth-maker of Reading at the time of King Henry I, and that the name "became proverbial owing to the popularity of this book." "There was some joke or conventional meaning among Elizabethan dramatists," he says, "when they gave the name of Old Cole, which it is now difficult to recover." Dekker in the Satiromatrix of 1602, and Marston in The Malcontent of 1604, applied the name to a woman. On the other hand, Ben Jonson in Bartholomew Fair gave the name of Old Cole to the sculler in the puppet-play Hero and Leander which he there introduces.10 In face of this information, what becomes of the identity of the supposed king?
On the other hand a long ancestry is now claimed for certain characters of nursery fame who seemed to have no special claim to attention. The following verse appears in most collections of rhymes, and judging from the illustration which accompanies it in the toy-books, it refers sometimes to a boy and a girl, sometimes to two boys.
Jack and Gill went up the hill
To fetch a bottle of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Gill came tumbling after.
This verse, as was first suggested by Baring-Gould,11 preserves the Scandinavian myth of the children Hjuki and Bill who were caught up by Mani, the Moon, as they were taking water from the well Byrgir, and they can be seen to this day in the moon carrying the bucket on the pole between them.
Another rhyme cited by Halliwell from The New Mad Tom o'Bedlam mentions Jack as being the Man in the Moon: —
The Man in the Moon drinks claret,
But he is a dull Jack-a-dandy;
Would he know a sheep's head from a carrot,
He should learn to drink cider or brandy.
(1842, p. 33.)
According to North German belief,
Chappell,
Baring-Gould,