Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child ...”

These words from the met­­­a­physical poet Wil­liam Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ bring to mind some of the special qualities of the child, along with the insight which is born of innocence. There are, of course, critics of what has popularly been given to children to read over countless generations — such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, which have been described by such detractors as full of cruelty, though owing to the apparently fanciful nature of these and similar tales, children seem to take this and the moral lessons of fairy tales in general, in their stride.

Then there are the many “songs of pleasant glee”, i.e. the nursery rhymes that exist in most if not all languages, and which are loved by all, including grown-up children like you and me. They have also been translated into countless languages — e.g. in Japan they appear under the title of ‘Maazaa Goosu’ (Mother Goose) — since the original Mother Goose’s Melody was published in 1765, and several editions of the rhymes have appeared over the following centuries under the title of ‘Mother Goose’.

The nursery rhymes we teach our children have a rich history attached to them, which we are mostly ignorant of

But if we look into the background of these “songs of pleasant glee”, we will be truly amazed. Take for example, Rain, rain go away, / Come again another day. This couplet was known in the languages of ancient Rome and Greece before the birth of Christ, and was chanted by children as a weather charm. It was thought by adults that only children had the power to alter weather conditions, so if it was raining, adults would tell them to recite this to make the sun reappear.

A similar charm is sung by Japanese children, who make simple paper dolls (Teruteru bozu), basically in the shape of a monk in long robes, and hang them from the window or the eaves of the house, when a picnic, a sports day or similar outdoor treat is planned for the next day — Teruteru bozu, teru bozu, / Ashita tenki ni shite o-kure. (Teruteru bozu, teru bozu, / Please give us fine weather tomorrow.)

The firm favourite, ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, evoking pictures of a mysterious bridge that must be ceaselessly rebuilt, is given 12 verses by The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, most of them suggesting different building materials. The original London Bridge was built by the Romans, who cannily chose for it the narrowest part of the Thames (they called it Tamesis) for this structure, which due to its position and stability gave rise to the first settlement of London.

However, in the time of King Ethelred, 1014 to be precise, Olaf the Norseman led his fleet up the river to destroy this bridge. They achieved it by tying ropes around its supporting piles, then rowing downstream as hard as they could, thus tearing the timbers of the bridge from the foundations.

You may think of him as an egg but he may have been a seige engine

The rebuilding of London Bridge as pictured in most nursery rhyme books was begun in 1176 by a French monk called Peter de Colechurch, and was situated about 27.4 metres downstream from the present structure. Until the mid-18th century it remained the only place to ford the Thames in the vicinity of London, and thus its fate — whether it would collapse or catch fire — was an important consideration not only for those connected with commerce, but also for those who lived and worked on it. It spanned the river like a street in fact, with houses and shops crowded together and propped up on it, inviting the danger of fire.

In Shakespeare’s time it was a well-known literary quarter, with many book shops and publishers. And when coaches became popular, traffic jams on the bridge were numerous, because at one point it was only 12 feet wide. What’s more, the heads of traitors were often spiked upon the top of the Great Stone Gate, to remind all of the drastic consequences of displeasing the monarch.

When the bridge was dismantled in the early 19th century, it is said that the 15 tons of iron which had strengthened the piers were bought by a cutler, who declared that it made the best cutlery he had ever known. Imagine eating your food with knives and forks and so on made from London Bridge!

One of the London bridges

The new bridge, designed by John Rennie, was officially opened by William IV in 1813 and survived until 1967, when its facing stone was sold to an American firm for $2,460,000, and reconstructed as a tourist site in Arizona. The present London Bridge is supported on two piers only, providing a clear central span of 100.5m across the main shipping channel.

Many of these verses contain hidden satire on the monarch and politics of their day, and the reign of Henry VIII inspired a number of popular nursery rhymes, some making indirect reference to his abolition of the monasteries after his break from the Catholic Church. Take ‘Little Jack Horner’, for example, which goes, Little Jack Horner / Sat in the corner/ Eating his Christmas pie. / He put in his thumb / And pulled out a plum, / And said, ‘What a good boy am I.’

The events surrounding this rhyme show how the Abbot of Glastonbury, eager to avoid Henry’s displeasure over the huge new monastery kitchen — bigger than the king’s — sent a large pie to him as a Christmas gift, in the hands of his own steward, John Horner. Under the piecrust were the title deeds of 12 manors, and the story says that Horner sat in a corner of his carriage and pulled out for himself, not a plum exactly, but the title deeds of the Manor of Mells. In spite of this gift, the abbot was hung, drawn and quartered in 1539 as a warning to other church dignitaries refusing to sign the Act of Supremacy acknowledging the king as the head of the church in England, while the monastery and other church properties in the area were requisitioned by Henry. The Horner family, of course, have always claimed that John actually bought the Manor of Mells.

A paean to royal greed

Similarly, ‘Sing a Sing of Sixpence’ is believed to refer to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie have been variously interpreted. One theory is that the blackbirds were 24 title deeds hidden under the pastry, while another suggests that they represented the choirs of 24 monasteries about to be liquidated, the king in the counting house being Henry, the queen eating bread and honey being his first wife Catherine of Aragon, and the maid in the garden being Anne Bolyen. The blackbird that pecked off her nose, say some, was a demon snapping off her nose to reach her soul, as she was a sinner.

Meanwhile, in ‘The Italian Banquet’, translated into English in 1598, there is indeed a recipe for a pie with live birds inside, which would fly out and make straight for the candles on the dinner table, snuffing out the flames and causing a state of merry confusion among the guests in the dark.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. / All the king’s horses and all the king’s men /Couldn’t put Humpty together again. This rhyme has puzzled historians for centuries, and one school of thought claims that its history covers not just hundreds, but thousands of years, while similar rhymes appear in France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Germany.

The most recent story goes that a certain Dr Chillingworth was employed by King Charles I during the Civil War to invent war machines with which to surprise the enemy. So he planned a huge machine which would roll down a steep slope on wheels, packed with hundreds of troops, cross the River Severn and thus deposit the men inside the city of Gloucester, which was the enemy headquarters. Funnily, troops on both sides called this invention “Humpty Dumpty”. And the wily Gloucester folk, hearing of this plan well in advance widened the river, so that HD collapsed in mid-stream, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were either drowned or had to beat an ignominious retreat, not knowing that Colonel Massey of Gloucester had only three barrels full of gunpowder left for the defence of the city.

Yes, kings and queens figure very largely in these rhymes, but there are many arising out of the lives of common folk, too. ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’ must be one of the oldest known cradle songs, and it refers to the custom of hanging babies in rush baskets from the branches of trees, to be rocked to sleep by the wind. But some believe that this was intended as the mother bird’s song as she taught her young to fly. Others attribute its authorship to a youth who went with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the early 17th century, and was taught by an American Indian how to hang a birch-bark cradle on the branch of a tree. Other American authorities have seen it as a satire on the British royal line in James II’s time, and interestingly, the lullaby as it appears in the 1765 edition of Mother Goose’s Melody, is followed by a footnote saying that “This [rhyme] may serve as a warning to the proud and ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last.”

But the best-known mnemonic rhyme in English is the one that begins, Thirty days hath September, / April, June and November, recited in both the home and the classroom. It appears in most nursery rhyme books subsequent to 1825, though Arthur Hopton, writing in 1612, gives the Latin origin of it, which testifies to its long history, while William Harrison in 1577 presents it in English with the spelling of that day.

So these are some of the “songs of pleasant glee” that we still teach our innocent children. The glee we understand, but most of us are completely ignorant of the history and satire we are actually teaching, though there are some rhymes like the well-loved “Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep” that defy all attempts to give them a long history.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 21st, 2014