Education: Who Started Cock Robin?

Where did they all come from—the familiar names and faces which populate the world’s nurseries and schoolrooms: the Little Jack Homers, the Georgie Porgies, the old women who live in shoes? Last week Britain’s grown-ups were getting the scholarly lowdown from an authoritative reference book: the Oxford University Press’s new Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.

Editors lona and Peter Opie spent seven years looking through haystacks of diaries, letters, books and plays to find their needling rhymes & riddles. They dug into the histories of kings and queens, wits and wags, drunks and druids, consulted everyone from George Bernard Shaw to their own children, aged six and four.

As Old as Rome. Some rhymes, they found, are at least as old as the city of Rome. Horace described little children playing Rex erit qul recte faciet—the first version of “I’m the king of the castle.” Petronius heard a small boy say Bucca, bucca, quot sunt hie?, which later became “Buck she, buck she, buck / How many fingers do I hold up?” At least one rhyme in nine, say the Opies, was known in the time of Charles I; a good half are at least 200 years old.

The early counting of Yarmouth shepherds (ina, mina, tethera, methera) became “Eena, meena, mina, mo”; and Westmorland’s hevera,devera,dick (eight, nine and ten) is the most likely origin of “Hickory, dickory, dock.” In the 18th Century, “Hot Cross Buns / One a penny / Two a penny” was a street vendor’s cry. “Baa, baa, black sheep / Have you any wool?” probably dates back to the export tax imposed on wool in 1275. The “Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie” goes back to the Renaissance, when live birds really were put in pies, ready to fly out when the pie was cut, to cause a “diverting Hurley-Burley amongst the Guests.”

Out of the Barracks. Most rhymes, the Opies learned, were never intended for children. “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John” was a 17th Century Popish prayer; “Go to bed, Tom” was once a barracks ditty. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” possibly had a “religious background … ‘a word-picture of Our Lady’s Convent’ . . . the bells being the sanctus bells, the cockleshells the badges of the pilgrims, and the pretty maids the nuns . . .”

Only a few rhymes have known authors (e.g., Dr. Johnson, who one day suddenly spouted: “If a man who turnips cries / Cry not when his father dies / It is proof that he would rather / Have a turnip than his father”). Many were satire. Some rhyme scholars believe that the downfall of Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry—popularly known as the “Robinocracy”—gave rise to “Who killed Cock Robin?”, and that Georgie Porgie was really King George I.

As for Little Jack Horner, he was very likely the thieving steward of Glastonbury Abbey during the reign of Henry VIII. “The story goes,” say the Opies, “that at the time of the Dissolution, the abbot … sent his steward to [Henry VIII] with a Christmas gift: a pie in which were hidden the title deeds of twelve manors. On the journey, Jack Horner is said to have opened the pie and extracted the deed of the Manor of Mells . . . His descendants live there to this day.”