Frontispiece to Thomas Ravenscroft's Pammelia, Mvsicks Miscellanie, 1609. Image: Public domain.

Tudor Nursery Rhymes

by Nicholas Orme
August 6, 2024

Children are the great unknown of history, until the last couple of centuries. Very little survives about what they did each day, or what they said and sang and played with. Yet they clearly had a culture of their own, as they do today, overlapping with that of adults but also with its own features. In Tudor England (1485–1603) there was a toy industry to cater for them, books for them to read, and games that they played, with stakes of pins instead of money.

One strand of this culture consists of nursery rhymes. But not quite as we know them. The modern understanding of nursery rhymes comes from the eighteenth century, when they were first collected into anthologies. This fixed the texts, so that nowadays you cannot change the words of Jack and Jill Went Up The Hill or Little Miss Muffet. They have become classics. In previous centuries, there were no fixed texts, and we find variations in the words because they were largely passed around orally.

Nursery rhymes, then as now, were a mixture of verses thought suitable for children and adult songs of the day that children overheard and adopted. But only two people noticed and collected what children were saying or singing. One was a little-known playwright, William Wager, whose play The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art (1569) features a scatterbrained young boy reciting a whole list of rhymes that he said he learnt from a “fond” (foolish) woman who worked for his mother. Here are a couple of examples:

Tom-a-lin and his wife, and his wife’s mother,
They went over a bridge all three together.
The bridge was broken and they fell in,
“The Devil go with all,” quoth Tom-a-lin.

This has not come to modern times, but it is like the vignette episodes that you find in Humpty Dumpty or Little Bo-Peep.

Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?
Thy sheep be in the corn!
And, for one blast of thy minikin [dainty] mouth,
Thy sheep shall take no harm.

This you may recognise as an ancestor of our “Little boy blue, come blow up your horn.”

Two songs known to children. Above, Three Blind Mice. Below, Jack Boy, Ho Boy, an ancestor of Pussy’s In The Well. Image: Public domain.

The other collector was the musician Thomas Ravenscroft. Between 1609 and 1611 he published simple musical settings of popular songs and rhymes for amateur performers. Two of these are familiar to us today, but not in quite the same words:

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
Dame Julian, Dame Julian,
The miller and his merry old wife,
She scraped her tripes, lick thou the knife.

Jack, boy, ho! boy, the cat is in the well,
Let us sing now for her knell,
Ding dong, ding dong, bell.

Wager and Ravenscroft have done us a great service in pointing to the existence of rhymes like these, known to children. When we realize that such rhymes existed, we can look for others—sometimes merely scraps of a few words. “Cock a doodle doo, Peggy hath lost her shoe,” turns up in a lurid account of a murder in 1602. “Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man” is quoted by Shakespeare in King Lear. “The marriage of the Frog and the Mouse,” set by Ravenscroft, is an ancestor of “Froggy would a-wooing go” and other such stories.

These little grains of gold dust survive almost by chance. Yet they point to a rich culture of children’s rhymes and songs, which we might otherwise assume had never existed.


Nicholas Orme has written over thirty books on English social, religious, and cultural history. They include Medieval Children (2003), Tudor Children (2024), Medieval Schools (2006), Going to Church in Medieval England (2021), and The History of England’s Cathedrals (2024), all published by Yale University Press. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

For Professor Orme’s biography and list of publications see his page at the University of Exeter.


Latest from Blog