You probably think nursery rhymes are sweet. Most of us do. We sing them to babies to get them to stop crying or to help them drift off to sleep. But honestly, if you actually look at the lyrics we’re chanting, they are incredibly dark. We’re talking about the plague, tax revolts, religious persecution, and physical injury. It’s a bit weird, right? One second you're humming a tune, and the next, you're describing a guy falling off a wall and shattering into pieces.
The history of nursery rhymes isn't just a collection of bedtime stories; it’s a messy, unpolished mirror of British and European history. These verses survived for centuries because they were the "Twitter" of the 17th and 18th centuries—snarky, political, and often dangerous to say out loud in plain English.
Why We Started Singing These Things
Before we had the internet or even widespread literacy, people used oral tradition to keep stories alive. Most nursery rhymes didn't start in the nursery. They started in the pub. Or the town square. Or during a bloody revolution.
Take "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep." It sounds like a simple counting song for toddlers learning about farm animals. It isn't. Historians like Katherine Elwes Thomas, who wrote The Real Personages of Mother Goose in 1930, pointed out that this rhyme likely refers to the heavy wool tax of 1275. King Edward I decided he wanted a cut of everything. One bag for the King, one for the Church (the Master), and nothing for the poor shepherd (the little boy down the lane). It’s a protest song about medieval taxation.
We kept the melody because it was catchy. We lost the political anger because, well, the tax man from 1275 isn't around anymore to make us mad.
The Bubonic Plague and the "Ring Around the Rosie" Myth
We have to address the elephant in the room. You’ve definitely heard that "Ring Around the Rosie" is about the Great Plague of London in 1665. The "rosie" is the rash, the "posies" are herbs to hide the smell of death, and "ashes, ashes" is the cremation of bodies.
Except, it probably isn't.
Folklore experts like Iona and Peter Opie, who are basically the gold standard for rhyme research, have been skeptical of this for decades. There’s no record of the rhyme appearing in print until the late 19th century. If it were truly about the 1665 plague, why did it take 200 years to show up? It’s more likely a game about curtsying. Sometimes a rhyme is just a rhyme, and the "plague" explanation is just a bit of urban legend that we all collectively decided to believe because it sounds cool at parties.
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Real People, Real Problems
When you dig into the history of nursery rhymes, you find real historical figures hiding in the verses.
Humpty Dumpty: He wasn't always an egg. In fact, nowhere in the rhyme does it say he’s an egg. That’s a visual we got from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. One popular theory suggests Humpty Dumpty was actually a massive Royalist cannon used during the Siege of Colchester in the English Civil War (1648). It sat on a church wall, the wall got hit by Parliamentary fire, and the cannon fell. "All the King's horses and all the King's men" couldn't put the heavy piece of artillery back together again.
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: This one is likely about Mary I of England, famously known as Bloody Mary. The "garden" is a metaphor for a graveyard. The "silver bells" and "cockle shells" weren't decorations; they were torture devices used against Protestants. The "pretty maids all in a row" might refer to the execution of Lady Jane Grey or perhaps a row of guillotines. It’s a gruesome political satire hidden in a song about flowers.
Goosey Goosey Gander: This is a surprisingly violent rhyme about religious intolerance. It describes an old man who "wouldn't say his prayers," so the narrator takes him by the left leg and throws him down the stairs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, "priest holes" were common in English homes where Catholic priests would hide to avoid persecution. If a Protestant searcher found one, they wouldn't just give them a ticket. They’d throw them down the stairs. Or worse.
Why the Nonsense Matters
A lot of people ask why these rhymes are so nonsensical. "Hey Diddle Diddle" makes zero sense. A cow jumping over the moon? A dog laughing?
Basically, these were a form of "nonsense verse" that allowed people to mock the elite without getting arrested. If you sang a song about the Queen being a "dish" running away with a "spoon" (a courtier), you could claim you were just singing a silly song for kids. It was plausible deniability.
The Victorian era changed everything. This was the point where the history of nursery rhymes took a turn toward the domestic. Middle-class parents wanted to shield their children from the grit of the real world. They started "cleaning up" the rhymes. They added illustrations that made everything look whimsical. This is when the cannon became an egg. This is when the political satire became a lullaby.
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The Survival of Mother Goose
Who was Mother Goose? It’s a bit of a mystery. Some say she was Elizabeth Goose, a woman in Boston in the 1700s. Others point to the French Contes de ma mère l'Oye by Charles Perrault in 1697. In reality, "Mother Goose" is a archetype. She’s the personification of the grandmotherly storyteller who keeps the oral tradition alive.
The first major collection of these rhymes was Mother Goose's Melody, published by John Newbery around 1780. Newbery was smart. He realized there was a huge market for children’s books. He took these old, gritty folk songs, packaged them with woodcut illustrations, and sold them to the emerging middle class.
It's Not Just British History
While we focus a lot on the English-speaking tradition, the history of nursery rhymes is global. Every culture has them.
In Germany, the Struwwelpeter stories are famously terrifying, designed to scare children into behaving. If you suck your thumb, a tailor comes and snips it off. Compared to that, a guy falling off a wall is pretty tame.
The French have "Au clair de la lune," which seems like a sweet song about asking a neighbor for a pen, but historians have long debated its underlying, slightly more "adult" double entendres.
Humanity has a weird habit of taking the things that scare us or anger us and turning them into rhythmic, rhyming chants. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way to process trauma. It’s also just a really effective way to remember things before we had Wikipedia.
How to Explore This Further
If you want to go deeper into the history of nursery rhymes, stop looking at modern children's books. They’ve been sanitized. They’re "PG" versions of "R-rated" history.
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- Check the sources: Look for the Opies' The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. It is the definitive academic text on this. It’s heavy, it’s dry, but it’s 100% accurate.
- Analyze the dates: If someone tells you a rhyme is about a specific event, check when the rhyme was first written down. If there's a 200-year gap, be skeptical.
- Look for the subtext: Read "Little Jack Horner." He’s not just a kid eating pie. He’s likely Thomas Horner, a steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury, who "pulled out a plum"—a deed to a manor house—while delivering a gift to King Henry VIII.
Next time you hear someone singing "London Bridge is Falling Down," don't just think about the architecture. Think about the Viking attacks of 1014. Think about the theory of "immurement" (the dark idea that bridges needed a human sacrifice to stay up).
These rhymes are the survivors of history. They outlasted the kings they mocked and the wars they described. They are tiny, rhythmic time capsules.
Practical Steps for History Lovers:
- Visit the British Library's digital archives. They have scans of the original 18th-century chapbooks where many of these rhymes first appeared in print.
- Compare versions. Nursery rhymes change based on geography. "Mary Had a Little Lamb" is an American rhyme (based on a real girl named Mary Sawyer in 1830s Massachusetts), which feels very different from the older, darker British verses.
- Read the lyrics literally. Ignore the cute cartoons. If you read "Rock-a-bye Baby" literally, you are singing about a baby falling out of a tree. Ask yourself: Why would anyone write that? (Hint: It might be about the "Old Pretender," the son of King James II, who was rumored to have been smuggled into the birthing room in a warming pan).
The world is a lot more interesting when you realize the "silly" songs we teach toddlers are actually the scars of history.
Next Steps for Deepening Your Research
Start by looking up the "Halliwell-Phillipps" collection. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps was a 19th-century collector who preserved hundreds of these rhymes before they could be "sanitized" out of existence by Victorian sensibilities. His work provides the rawest look at the folk tradition before it was turned into a commercial product for the modern nursery. Search for his The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) in public domain archives like Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive to see the original, often more rugged, versions of the songs you know.