Six Impossible Episodes: More Mother Goose

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode is the next installment in our Six Impossible Episodes series. If you are new to the show, sometimes I grouped together six topics that for one reason or another can't really work as a full episode, or sometimes they just worked together as a group. And the last time we did this we talked about mother Goose and nursery rhymes, and I was not planning for the very next one to be more nursery rhymes, but so many people wrote in to say please do more of those that I was like, sure, seems like fun. Last time we talked about who this mother Goose person is anyway, along with the Muffin man ring around, the Rosy Little Jack Corner, Rockabye Baby, and Mistress Mary quite contrary. So if you are curious about the origins of any of those and have not heard that earlier episode that came out on May three of this year, which is in Case to Meet a Refresher, I sure do. And we kicked off that previous Six Impossible Episodes with a caveat, and we're going to do the same today. A lot of English language nursery rhymes are more than three hundred years old. Most of the ones we're talking about today appeared in some form in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook that was first printed in seventy four and is the first known English language collection of nursery rhymes. Most but not all nursery rhymes circulated orally for some time before being written down, and many also have precursors or influences from other languages that are at least as old as the ones that are in English, so they have been around for a long time. Aim but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that people started really studying these poems that came along with a rise in academic interest in folklore. So for the most part, these purported explanations for what these poems mean we're first proposed hundreds of years after the poems were composed. Katherine Elis Thomas published The Real Personages of Mother Goose in nineteen thirty, and that became a pretty big source for a lot of these interpretations. While that book does have very extensive cross references to different pieces of literature and historical events, all of which are very precisely footnoted. Some of them do seem like kind of a stretch. Many historians in folklorists argue that these kinds of interpretations are mostly conjecture. You maybe have heard the term backronym. In an acronym, a word is formed out of an abbreviation, like radio detection and ranging, becoming the word radar. But a backronym takes an existing word that was not created from an abbreviation and makes up an abbreviation to go with it. For example, there's the Apgar score, which was named for Virginia Apgar, who we've covered on the show before, but then people later turned this into a mnemonic for what the score evaluates, and that is a list of the newborn babies appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration, which of course spell out the word Apgar. So it's possible, or maybe even likely, that at least some of these interpretations are more like backronyms than actual reflections of what the people who made up the rhymes intended for them to mean, If in fact, they intended for them to mean anything. Sometimes it seems like they just meant to be silly. At the same time, though, these are fun and they give us a chance to take a quick look at the various historical moments and people in places these poems may or may not be related to. So first, up, good old Jack and Jill, who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. There is a second and probably slightly newer verse that's maybe not as well known, which is up Jack got and home did trot as fast as he could caper to old Dame daub who patched his knob with vinegar and brown paper? Had you heard that before, Holly, I feel like I have, but I couldn't tell you where because I remember having a thought about like, wait, are they saying that he's uh, some sort of pinata boy? Like I didn't understand that the brown paper situation. It said like a little vinegar paper Michie going on. I don't think I had, because one of the things that we're going to get to reference this vinegar and brown paper, And I was like, what are you talking about? Where does this come from? Because I had not actually found a second verse written out yet so. Starting in the early nineteenth century, in addition to those two verses, people started tacking on more and more verses and using this as a template for pantomimes and plays and illustrations of this nursery rhyme dating back over the last couple of centuries. Sometimes Jack and Jill are depicted as young children, but sometimes they are teens or young adults. The earliest known version of this poem was printed in Mother Goose's Melody in seventeen sixty five, and there are several interpretations or explanations of where it came from. First, Kilmursdon in North Somerset, England, is home to a Jack and Jill Hill. The path up the hill has a set of stone markers that contain lines from the poem. Kilmursdon School is at the top of the hill and there's a plaque on the side of it that was placed in the year two thousand bearing the full poem along with the inscription quote. It is said that centuries ago Jack and Jill daily went up the hill for water. One fateful day, Jack was hit by a boulder from nearby Badstone Quarry. He tumbled down and suffered a wound that not even vinegar and brown paper could mend. Jill also died young, but not before she had given birth to the couple's son, whom villagers raised and called Jill's son. The surname Gilson still features widely in this area. And that's when I was like, what is this vinegar and brown paper thing on the side of the school. Some sources pinpoint this story as having been something that happened sometime in the fifteenth century, and there are also variations in which Jack and Jill in this story were a married couple, and then other ones where they were going up the hill because they were not married and their relationship was a secret and they're fetching water was just the pretenses that they could have some time alone together. There are also speculations that this is a reference to King Louis the sixteen and Maria Twinette being beheaded during the French Revolution. The problem there is that the king and queen were beheaded in sevente that's almost thirty years after this poem appeared in print for the first time. Another speculation there is a unit of measure that I sure do not use very often, which is called the gill, also spelled the jill. This unit of measure has been around since sometime in the thirteen hundreds, and it was initially used to measure servings of things like whiskey and wine. It still exists. It's still typically used for liquids, and its exact volume has varied over the years. Currently, in the United States it's equivalent to half a cup, while in the UK it is five British fluid ounces or a fourth of a pint. Back in the reign of King Charles the first which started in sixty five, a jill was half a jack, and a jack was also known as a jackpot. King Charles wanted to increase tax revenue, and one way to do this was to make liquid measures smaller. People probably wouldn't drink less if they were served a smaller portion. They would just buy more of those smaller measures and then have to pay a tax on each one. So King Charles reduced the size of the jack. In other words, jack fell down, and since a jill was half a jack, jill came tumbling after. Another idea is that this is an English language reference to the North myth of Jukie and Bill, who are siblings who follow the moon, or perhaps we're stolen away by the moon. They carry a pail of water on a pole in between them. Sometimes this is interpreted as the dark spots on the moon that we see when we look at it from the earth, representing Jukie and Bill. The names Jukie and Bill aren't really all that far off from Jack and Jill, like Jukie and Jack are a little different, but if you turn Bill into the same first letter, it's basically the same. So there's some speculation that they these are two versions of the same story. William Stewart Baring Gould was probably the first person to make this connection in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, which came out in eighteen sixty six. On a completely different note, Catherine L. Was Thomas argues that this poem is quote a fling at Cardinal Wolsey and his coadjutor, Bishop tarb They were going up the hill to arrange a marriage between Mary Tudor and the French monarch. The pail of water in this interpretation is holy water. Among Thomas's citations for this interpretation is a poem from harleyan Miscellany published in sixteen sixty one, which uses the names Jack and Jill in reference to Wolsey's opposition to Henry the Eighth marriage to Anne Boleyn at the same time, though the names Jack and Jill have really gone together as a pair in English for centuries, with the first use and writing dating back more than a hundred years before that sixteen sixty one public a. And we're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we will get to another poem that may or may not have something to do with Cardinal Woolsey. Our next rhyme, Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone. When she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none. I think most folks are probably familiar with that bit of the poem, but there is a whole whole lot more of it than just that first bit. Uh And curiously, the rest of the stanzas have fewer lines and a slightly different cadence from that first bit. The next stanza is she went to the baker's to buy him some bread, and when she came back, the poor dog was dead. Okay, that's troubling, but don't be alarmed. It's okay. Mother Hubbard goes to the undertakers to buy the dog a coffin, but when she comes back, he's a laughing. It works out, that's fine. Uh. This poem becomes increasingly fanciful, with old mother Hubbard bringing the dog some linen, hose, a hat, some fruit, a coat, a wig, some tripe, some fish, and some wine, and the dog, bless his heart, wearing clothes, playing the flute, feeding the cat, riding the goat, dancing a jake, smoking a pipe, washing a dish, and standing on his head. It's a lot. Uh, it's really kind of fun back and forth that way through many stanzas. It starts out with me feeling like she's not the best pet caretaker, but then by the end, I'm like, oh, they're both bananas. It's okay, yeah, there they both have a lot going on here. So in terms of nursery rhyme authorship, this one's a little unusual, especially in terms of what we've talked about in uh this couple of episodes, we're actually pretty sure who wrote this and when, and it has that in common with Mary Had a Little Lamb, which Sarah Josepha Hale published in eighteen thirty. We have talked about that on the podcast before Old Mother Hubbard first appears as The comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog by Sarah Catherine Martin, published on June first, eighteen o five. As the story goes, Martin was in her thirties and she was visiting her sister, and her future brother in law became really annoyed because she kept trying to talk to him while he was trying to do something else. So he told her in a really insulting way to go write a poem or something. So she did, and that poem became what's known as Old Mother Hubbard. Even though the eighteen o five version is the first printed version of the full poem we know today, it may have had some earlier inspirations. Mother Hubbard was already something of a stock character long before this, dating back at least to Edmund Spencer's fifty nineties satire Prosopopoia or Mother Hubbard's Tail. Although this piece features the name Mother Hubbard, there is no dog and there's no bone in a cupboard. There are also some parallels to a poem that was published in Gammer Girton's Garland in four This one references an old woman who quote lived upon nothing but victuals and drink. When the woman in this poem goes off to the baker to buy some bread, and she comes home to find her husband dead, not her dog. But then after she goes to the clerk to toll the bell for him, she comes back home again to find her husband. Well, that's not the only indication that there may have been earlier versions of at least the first few stanzas of Old Mother Hubbard. Coffin doesn't rhyme with laughing, but it does rhyme with laffin, which was used to mean laughing in the works of such writers as William Shakespeare. So it is possible that the first three stances are so already existed in some form, and that Martin built on them at the start of the nineteenth century. And as we said back before the break, there's some suggestion that this circles back around to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. The interpretation here is that all those things that Mother Hubbard brings to her dog, and all of her dog's responses recreate the back and forth between Wolsey and the Pope when Wolsey was trying and failing to negotiate a divorce for Henry the eighth than Catherine of Aragon and the real personages of Mother Goose Katherine Elis. Thomas cites the tragedy of Cardinal Wolsey that was first printed in the Mirror for Magistrates in seven and that includes a reference to a dog and a bone, And then there are also some other sixteenth century satires that call the cardinal by the name Jack. Today, there is a cottage in Devon known as Old Mother Hubbard's Cottage, purportedly where Martin lived when she wrote the poem. Part of the lore surrounding that cottage is that she was working as a housekeeper at nearby Kittley House. But Martin was also reportedly the daughter of a member of Parliament and the one time love interest of King William the Fourth while he was a prince, so there is some question about whether she would have gotten a job as a housekeeper. Yeah, so we will move on from there to Bob Bob black Sheep. Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, their three bags full, one for the Master and one for the Dame, and one for the little boy who lives down the lane. That's probably the version of that that most people are most familiar with. Sometimes people sing it to the same basic tune as Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star or the Alphabet song. This poem has stayed pretty much the same for almost three hundred years since its first appearance in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book in se except that version ends with but none for the little boy who cries in the lane, so it's a little bit sadder. Most of the purported historical meanings for this poem have to do with taxes. One is the so called Great Custom, which was a tax on wool that Parliament granted to Edward the First of England in twelve seventy five. So in this poem, the sheep is saying, there's wool for the master, that being the King, and the Dame that being the landlord, and none for the poor child. Katherine Ellis Thomas puts forth the same basic idea that connects it to a different era, that being the reign of Edward the sixth and the Norfolk Rising of fifteen forty nine, which was also known as Cat's Rebellion. This rebellion was connected to landowners inclosing common land, which meant that tenants no longer had space for grazing their animals, including their sheep. Then the same basic idea is the same, that the master and the Dame were the king and the nobility, and that the little boy represented the common people. Since about the nineteen eighties, various people have raised questions about whether this poem has a racial component or a connection to the Transatlantic slave trade. Since the sheep is described as black, the term black sheep has been used as an idiom meaning outcast or a disreputable person since at least sixteen forty. The idea of black sheep is somehow different from other sheep also appeared in English translations of the Christian Bible at least a century before that. All the black lambs in a flock are gathered up as part of someone's wages in the Book of Genesis. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this may be the idioms origin, although the color is not always translated as black in these verses and the animals are not always translated as being sheep, but the word black has been used to describe both people of African descent and things that are thought of as evil or wicked for more than a thousand years. Both of those meanings go all the way back to early Old English. So while this poem probably was not originally meant as a reference to the Transatlantic slave trade, and the word black in there might have just been for the sake of it being alliterative with the bob bob heart, at this point those connotations are pretty deeply entrenched in the English language. So next another poem, London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady. Early versions of this poem have London Bridge broken down rather than falling, and there are a lot more verses about what materials should be used to build it back up again, and why all of those materials will not work, like quote, build it up with wooden clay, wooden clay, wooden clay, wooden clay will wash away, my fair lady. From there it's bricks and mortar which will not stay, and then iron and steel which will bend in bow, and silver and gold which will be stolen away. The states an even more nonsensical turn, because rather than finding a more suitable bridge material than silver and gold, the proposed solution is to set a man to watch all night to make sure nobody steals it. But since there's a chance that the man might fall asleep, that suggested that he'd be given a pipe to smoke. Sure, it's sort of like there's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza, but about structural engineering, um and smoking keeping people away. This is another poem that was in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, and earlier versions have slightly different second and fourth lines of each stanza, as in London Bridge is broken down, dance over my Lady Lee, London Bridge is broken down with a gay lady. It's possible that the Lady Lee is meant to be the River Lee, which is a tributary of the Thames. But there are also pieces of this poem that date back even earlier than Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook and the London Shanta Clears, which was first printed in sixteen fifty nine. There's some dialogue about dancing the building of the London Bridge, and there are ref princes to other London Bridge dances that date back to the early eighteenth century, although the dances themselves don't survive. There's also a seventeen twenty five satire called namby Pamby, and in that there are the words Namby Pamby is no clown, London Bridge is broken down. Now he courts the gay lady dancing or the lady lee. There is a lot of speculation that this rhyme references a real destruction of London Bridge, or, if not London Bridge, some other bridge in or near London, but it's usually not identified as the damage that came from the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty six or the burning of London Bridge in eleven thirty five that led to the bridge being rebuilt with stone. Instead, it's usually proposed to be an attack by King Olaf the second of Norway in ten fourteen, something that is referenced in Norse accounts but not in early English ones. We're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and when we cut back, we're going to talk about two more rhymes, both of which are just a little bit more violent, one maybe a lot more violent. We mentioned in our previous nursery rhyme Impossible episodes that nursery rhymes can be really strange and scary and violent. There's just so much falling down and a lot of head injuries. It's like a precursor to every short story that Flannery O'Connor wrote. Kind of Yeah, ify's head breaks open, so we're gonna end onto more dramatic examples of this. The first is Ladybird ladybird, which in the US we usually called ladybug ladybug, because that's what we call that insect. This is another poem that appears in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, and this one goes, ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone, or sometimes your house is on fire and your children will burn. There's also a slightly longer and probably newer version that offers some hope that not all of Ladybird's children are burned, are gone, ending all except one, and her name is Anne, and she hid under the baking pan. There are some variations on this, like in Yorkshire, England, ladybirds were known as lady cows, or in Norfolk they were Bernie bee, and there was a rhyme that went Bernie b Bernie beats. Tell me when your wedding beat, if it be tomorrow day, take your wings and fly away. I love that. The most straightforward interpretation of this is that it's almost like saying bless you or gazuntite when someone sneezes. In many parts of Europe, ladybugs or ladybirds if that's where they're called where you live, have been associated with the Virgin Mary for centuries. That lady in ladybird is our lady. So in that cultural and religious tradition, if a ladybug lands on you, you you should take special care not to cause it any harm. So you can recite this poem, gently blow on the insect and send it on its way. But there's also a BBC article that claims that this poem is about quote sixteenth century Catholics and Protestant England and the priests who were burned at the stake for their beliefs. Uh. This article doesn't cite any sources for that claim, but logically the connection that our Lady is a common name for the Virgin Mary and Catholicism and the poem involving fire is where that comes from. Of all the things we have talked about today, this one is like the least documented as far as how people got from point A to point B, and lastly, the most directly violent of the nursery rhymes, at least in terms of what we're talking about today. It is who killed cock Robin? And although that question an axe, as both the first line and the title, there is no mystery about who did it. The killer is named right away, Who killed cock Robin? I said the sparrow with my bow and arrow, I killed cock Robin. From there we find out there were witnesses to this killing quote who saw him die? I said the fly with my little eye, I saw him die, and some versions the fly has a little teeny. I also one of the animals caught cock Robin's blood as he was dying. In some versions this is the duck, which was just his luck, and in others it was the fish with his little dish. I'm not sure why you'd want to catch it, but okay, yeah. It turns out this is secretly about vamporism among animals. From there, the animals go on to plan cock Robin's funeral, with the beatle making the shroud with a thread and needle, the owl digging his grave with a pick and trowel, the rook with this little book being the parson, the dove acting as chief mourner, either because she'd previously mourned for her love or because cock Robin was her love. Animals, many of them birds, all have roles. Most of the animals are small, although the bull is the one who tolls the bell. Sometimes this is illustrated as a bull, but in others it is a bull finch. Some versions of this poem and with all the animals sighing and sobbing when the bell tolls for poor cock Robin, but others have a few more lines after that quote, while the cruel cock sparrow, cause of their grief, was hung on a gibbet next day like a thief. So this is such a weird poem for kids. Uh. It goes beyond Jack and Jill falling down, or even a cradle falling out of a treetop, to just straightforward murder. It's first four verses were in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, with the first line reading who did kill cock Robin? Since that first publication there have been a lot of standalone books and chat books, many of them very dramatically illustrated. Death and Burial of Poor cock Robin, printed in eighteen sixty five, is illustrated with animal heads on fully dressed mostly human bodies, but others have the animals simply as animals, many starting off with a picture of a dead Robin on his back pierced through with an arrow. For some reason, I find that eighteen sixty seven illustration with the animal heads on human bodies just profoundly disturbing. Oh, I love it. We can talk more about this in the behind the scenes. There are also other versions of this that build out the back story with the courtship and a marriage between cock Robin and Jenny Wren before a hawk ab ducts Jenny Wren and then cock Robin gets murdered, and then there are sequels as well which tell the story of cock Robin's trial and execution. William Stewart baring Gould's The Annotated Mother Goose speculates that this rhyme might be much older than seventeen forty four, since the earliest versions read I said the owl with my pick and a shovel, which doesn't rhyme now, but it would have in earlier eras it's the same sort of logic as that coffin laughing rhyme from Old Mother Hubbard. Another possible clue that it might be much older is the existence of a stained glass window and Buckland Rectory, Gloucester, which dates back to the fifteenth century. It depicts a robin that has been shot through the heart with an arrow. There are also some parallels to the Book of Philip Sparrow by John Skelton, which dates back to fifteen o eight, but even if this poem does date back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, it's possible that it saw renewed popularity in the eighteenth century thanks to Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole was hugely influential in British politics and effectively served as Prime Minister from about seventeen one to seventeen forty two, making him Britain's first prime minister, even though that term was not formally used in Parliament yet. He became increasingly unpopular starting in about seventeen thirty seven, and that downward slide continued after Britain went to war with Spain in the War of Jenkins ear in seventeen thirty nine. Walpole finally resigned on February two, seventeen forty two, at which point the King named him first Earl of Orford. He remained influential after this point, but the heyday of his time in the government was over. That period of more than twenty years became known as the robin Ocracy, and it ended just a couple of years before cock Robin first appeared in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook. William Stewart Barren Gould is one of the people who suggest that maybe cock Robin is supposed to represent Walpole and this poem is about his political downfall. Peter and Iona Opie make the same suggestion in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. There is also a totally different interpretation Shin, and that's that this is a retelling of the death of the Norse god Balder, son of Odin, who was killed when Loki convinced Hodd to throw some mistletoe, mistletoe being the only thing that could hurt Balder. Hodd was blind, so he didn't know what he was throwing the mistletoe at, or in some versions, what he was shooting with an arrow tipped in mistletoe. Who killed cock Robin is described as having some similarities to earlier versus recounting this tale, but the ones that Tracy found all came along later. Yes, I went on a search trying to figure out, like what maybe eighteenth century version of this poem was there, and I kept finding nineteenth century versions and I was like, this doesn't help. Another speculation is that this is about the death of Robin Hood, which I just found really charming considering that Disney's nineteventy three Robin Hood film is also anthropomorphins. Also, the death and Burial of cock Robin was the first Exidermy tableau of past podcast subject Near and Dear to my heart Walter Potter, we are bringing that out as a Saturday classic, Okay. I thought that would be a fun follow on to this particular episode. Those are our six nursery rhymes for this time around. I'm sure we will talk more about cock Robin in the behind the scenes because um, I have just number of thoughts. Uh until that points, I have listener mail that is from Virginia, and Virginia wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I've been leefully listening to the podcast since and have wanted to write in for a long time. Then this week Olivia Ward bush Banks episode, the moment came as I listened to the episode on my lunch break around the neighborhood. You mentioned a quote from the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, and I had a little embarrassing shuffle dance upon hearing the name and one of my master's classes, I came upon the Pittsburgh Courier as a reference for a paper and simply fell in love with the new paper. For the next sixteen months, I took every opportunity to research, read, and write about this little known, historic black newspaper. Being from Pittsburgh, I'm always going to look out to learn more about my hometown and how this newspaper has played several low key but still important parts in several important events during the Double V campaign, the civil rights movement, the integration of professional sports, and helping the middle class African American community develop and display their identity. Some many important names have been tied to this newspaper staff Wendel Smith, P. L. Prattus, Frank E. Bolden, George Schiler, and cartoonists who depicted cartoons that showed comical and commentary aspects of African American communities. They also hired the wonderful Charles Teeny Harris, a photographer whose photos have served as important depictions of everyday life in the Pittsburgh black neighborhoods. Known for his charisma, Harris could make his portrait subjects feel so at ease that they would forget the camera was present. Then he would take the picture to capture a truly beautiful moment. My favorite picture is a little boy in extra large boxing gloves sitting in his corner a single tier his rolled down his cheek, but he has the sweetest smile on his face and an impish twinkle in his eye. And then Virginia had a link to that picture. His eighty thousand collection of negatives and photographs were thankfully purchased by the Carnegie Museum of Art and as part of their digitizing project, along with a permanent exhibit of his works. While there might not be enough information to do a full episode on teeny Harris, I would wholeheartedly encourage you to consider him for one of the impossible episodes you may be planning in the future. I can promise you that you'll get pulled down the delightful research rabbit hole that I have happily hopped down myself, to a beautiful land of nineties and fifties community photos. Please please keep up all your amazing work. Thank you so much for all you do, Virginia. Thank you so much for this email. Virginia. I did indeed click on that link, and that photo is beauty full, and then I lost some time in the morning when I was meant to be researching instead looking at these gorgeous, gorgeous photographs. So thank you so much for sending this. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we are at History podcast that I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at Missed in History. That's why you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.