by Albert Jack
John is now best known as the enemy of the fictional hero Robin Hood. While the ballads were inspired by his apparent greed, it seems that the money wasn’t for him, or not all of it, in any case. When Richard was captured and held hostage by Duke Leopold, 150,000 marks was demanded – a king’s ransom in more ways than one. John and Isabella raised the funds by allegedly clearing out the coffers of England after finding they were unable to raise enough money from the royal vaults alone (between them both / They licked the platter clean). When Richard died in 1199, John took over as king but he was not an effective monarch and, tired of having their country mismanaged by a series of unreliable kings and queens, the barons famously forced him at Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta (1215), which limited the powers of the monarch and paved the way for modern democracy. In the words of Winston Churchill: ‘When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns.’
In more recent times, one Jack Spratt appears as the main character in two novels, The Big Over Easy (2005) and The Fourth Bear (2006), by Jasper Fforde. This Jack, a detective inspector in the Reading police force, investigates the crimes committed by other nursery rhyme characters. Like his namesake in the rhyme, the detective inspector neatly trims all the fat from his food before he eats it because he claims his wife died from eating too much fat.
Ladybird, Ladybird
LADYBIRD, ladybird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire and your children are gone;
All except one who is called little Ann,
For she crept under the frying pan.
‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ is, on the face of it, a gentle rhyme to sing to a black-and-red-spotted beetle if one happens to land upon your hand – always considered lucky. But if you read it carefully, it becomes more sinister. Why would anyone want to tell the ladybird her family is being destroyed in a fire, especially when it is most unlikely to be true?
For centuries, farmers and gardeners alike have actively encouraged ladybirds, as they eat aphids that might otherwise damage plants and crops. Hence one interpretation of the rhyme is that it is to encourage ladybirds to leave their land at the end of the season before the stubble is set on fire to make the fields ready for the next crop. But it appears that there’s more to the rhyme than that…
The word ladybird in fact derives from the Catholic term for the Virgin Mary, Our Lady’. Hence some historians believe the rhyme offered a warning to Catholics who refused to attend Protestant services following enforcement of the Acts of Uniformity (1549-59). Instead, many would hold Mass in non-church settings, often outdoors in the
countryside or in a barn. Inevitably, such defiance was met with violence and many Catholic priests were burned at the stake for continuing to practise their faith so openly (see Goosie, Goosie Gander).
The Lion and the Unicorn
THE lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown,
The lion beat the unicorn all around the town;
Some gave them white bread and some gave them brown,
Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town.
The origins of this nursery rhyme are rooted in the traditionally tense relationship between England and Scotland. England, whose standard bore the emblem of a lion, and Scotland, represented by a unicorn, had been at constant odds with each other since long before the English invasion of 1296. But this all calmed down when James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, uniting the two kingdoms under the Scottish Stuart dynasty. To this day, the royal Coat of Arms for the United Kingdom bears both the lion of England and the unicorn of Scotland.
Unfortunately, the Stuart monarchy didn’t prove a particularly steady one and did not last long on the English throne, as several of the other nursery rhymes show (see Remember, Remember the Fifth of November and Rock-a-Bye, Baby in particular). Not one but two Stuart kings were sacked by Parliament and the people, and in 1714 the Hanoverian royal family took over.
Although technically now British citizens, the Scots had remained loyal to the Stuart line, and when Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in Scotland in 1745, many rallied to his cause and the Lion and the Unicorn really were fighting for the crown. At first, the Unicorn seemed to be winning, with victories at Prestonpans and Carlisle. By the time they reached Derby, his advisers forced Bonnie Prince Charlie to agree to retreat to Scotland, as none of the English support he had been
promised had turned up and the Scots found themselves far too exposed. But by now, George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, was hot on their heels and he caught up with them at Culloden. Ignoring the advice of his best commander, Lord George Murray, Charles chose to fight on flat, open, marshy ground where his forces were exposed to superior British firepower. But Charles was commanding his army from a position from which he could not see what was happening. Hoping that Cumberland’s army would attack first, he left his men exposed to Hanoverian artillery for twenty minutes before finally ordering an attack. The ill-thought-out battle was a disaster for the Jacobites: The lion beat the unicorn all around the town.
With that, the Jacobites were on the run and heavily dependent on the charity and cover of their remaining supporters, who helped as much as they could afford to:
Some gave them white bread and some gave them brown, / Some gave them plum cake. But this was very dangerous for them to do as the Duke of Cumberland’s troops committed so many atrocities in their relentless search for the fleeing rebels, that he was later nicknamed ‘the Butcher’ in Scotland. (See also Elsie Marley.)
The most loyal supporters went to desperate measures to get their prince out of town – that is, Scotland – both for his sake and for their own. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s subsequent flight has become the stuff of legend, and is commemorated in the The Skye Boat Song. Assisted by loyal supporters, he evaded capture and left the country aboard a French frigate called, ironically enough, L’Heureux – ‘The Fortunate One’. In the end, the Lion had won.
Little Bo Peep
LITTLE Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them;
Leave them alone and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo Peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were all still fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed
For they’d left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To tack again each to its lambkin.
This poem has become one of the most easily recognized nursery rhymes. It was almost certainly intended as a simple piece of children’s entertainment with the obligatory moral lesson included. In this case, a lesson about responsibility and not, quite literally, falling asleep on the job. The earliest reference to the word is in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, when the court jester mentions a ‘bo peep’, which, according to Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), means ‘the act of looking out and then drawing back as if frightened’.
However, there is a very plausible theory explaining the real meaning behind the words of ‘Little Bo Peep’. It starts with Charles I (1600-49). The king had expensive tastes and was keen to dramatically increase the amount of money he received from taxation (see also Jack and Jill). Needless to say, this proved to be incredibly unpopular and led to frequent run-ins with Parliamen
t, especially when Charles reintroduced an obsolete form of taxation known as ‘ship money’, insisting on collecting it in peacetime, when this would originally have been authorized only during times of war. Other taxation imposed during this period was an excise tax on essential produce such as grain, vegetables and meat. This, naturally, affected the poor most of all, leading to the Smithfield Riots in 1647 and contributing to the English Civil War in its later stages. Another consequence of higher taxation was the rise in smuggling during this period. All the most secretive coves of southern England were a hive of activity, with ships and boats arriving from mainland Europe loaded with sought-after (and highly taxed) commodities such as tea, tobacco and brandy.
And it is down in the small Sussex village of St Leonards, a picturesque little place where many a smuggling tale is still told, that we can investigate the claim that ‘Little Bo Peep’ was actually a smuggler’s tale. To begin with, locals
call one of the Martello Towers in the town to this day ‘Bo Peep’. Records show that the king’s customs officers used the building and regularly imprisoned smugglers in the cellar before they were transported to London for trial and probable execution. A nearby minor road is called Bo Peep Lane, while at the bottom of the lane lies a farm of the same name. It is on a route that leads over the South Downs and to a secluded bay well known for its smuggling connections. The nearby Bo Peep Public House was a well-known smugglers’ den. Smugglers were always more popular along the south coast than the customs men, and locals had a wide network by which they could pass on information, often coded in the form of slang or rhyme. Hence in this context Little Bo Peep herself may be seen as the customs men, the sheep as the smugglers and the tails that had apparently been lost a reference to illicit contraband, such as brandy or rum, being shipped across the English Channel from France.
Little Boy Blue
LITTLE Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn;
The sheep’s in the meadow,
The cow’s in the corn.
Where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
Under a haystack
Fast asleep.
Will you wake him?
Oh no, not I,
For if I do,
He will surely cry.
Although the storyline of ‘Little Boy Blue’ sounds like a romantic reflection of idle country life, there’s far more to this rhyme than meets the eye.
The most widely credited theory about its origin is that Little Boy Blue is actually Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (c. 1470-1530), Lord Chancellor and Henry VIII’s right-hand man. During his time, Wolsey organized both the affairs of state and the Church with fulsome pomp and ceremony, building the ostentatious Hampton Court Palace for his own use in the process. His extravagance caused so much comment that he was also the subject of another lesser-known rhyme composed in the early 1530s:
Come ye to court! Which court?
The king’s court or Hampton Court?
Wolsey argued that there was no better place for a visiting nobleman, or even monarch, to arrive in England than on the banks of Hampton Court Palace. The king agreed and duly confiscated Hampton Court for his own use, stripping Wolsey of his office after the latter failed to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. But that is another story (see Old Mother Hubbard).
During his fourteen years in office, Wolsey commanded more power than any other Englishman and, though not quite of blue blood (Little Boy Blue), he wore the purple robes of a cardinal – the position making him more important even than the Archbishop of Canterbury – and was the Pope’s representative in England. His family crest also includes the faces of four blue leopards. Wolsey’s high-handed manner earned him many enemies, however, and his tendency to show off, or ‘blow his own trumpet’, alienated both the nobility and the common people. Also, as the man in charge of the Treasury and the Church, Wolsey was largely responsible for the economically important wool trade (see Baa, Baa, Black Sheep). So the rhyme could well be mocking his fall from grace: Little Boy Blue can no longer blow his [own] horn now that all his wealth and privilege have vanished away (The sheep’s in the meadow / The cow’s in the corn).
Another contender for Little Boy Blue is Charles II, who, despite being crowned king of Scotland on i January 1651, was prevented by Parliament from succeeding his father on to the English throne. Charles tried to make his presence felt by raising an army against England and travelling south but, on reaching Worcester, he was met by Cromwell’s forces and soundly defeated. Charles quickly escaped to France where, with a bounty of £1,000 on his head, he kept a low profile for the next nine years. While he was having the time of his life, drinking and gaming at the French and Dutch courts, the early years of the new English Commonwealth were rather less fun, almost every form of entertainment having been banned by the Puritans (see Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross). The rhyme alludes to this period in which the rightful heir (Little Boy Blue) peacefully slept away his afternoons while the English nation was in disarray: the sheep would not have been in the meadow and the cows nowhere near the corn if a proper king had been in charge. In other words, England needed her ‘shepherd’ back.
Little Jack Horner
LITTLE Jack Horner
Sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum
And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’
Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 there were more than eight hundred religious foundations in England with over 16,000 monks and nuns. During the following five years, they were all seized by the Crown and their land and buildings were either sold off or gifted to supporters of the king. One of the last to go was the ancient Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury and the tale of its own dissolution is said to supply the origin of this rhyme.
The Abbot of Glastonbury at the time was Richard Whyting, a rich and powerful figure who had been a signatory to the First Act of Supremacy (1534) granting King Henry VIII the legal authority as head of the Church of England. This was an outright rejection of the power of Catholicism and allowed the king to divorce and marry again (see also Three Blind Mice).
Despite choosing the king over the Pope, a basic requirement for keeping one’s head in sixteenth-century England, Whyting resisted the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey for as long as possible. It wasn’t just that it was one of the wealthiest in the kingdom, it was also a place of huge religious significance.
The abbey was allegedly founded by Jesus’s Joseph of Arimathea – the man who donated his tomb for the burial of Christ’s body after the Crucifixion – to house the Holy Grail. Joseph is said to have arrived by boat over the flooded Somerset Levels; disembarking at Glastonbury Tor, he stuck his staff into the ground, which flowered miraculously into the Holy Thorn (legend has it that the tree still bursts into blossom every year on Christmas Day). The colourful story was widely believed, Elizabeth I later used it as evidence that Christianity in England pre-dated the introduction of Roman Catholicism, thus legitimizing her role as Defender of the Faith.
So Whyting chose to placate, some might say bribe, the king. He sent his steward, Thomas Horner, to Hampton Court with the deeds to twelve manor houses, concealed beneath the crust of a large pie, posing as a gift. In those days, during property transactions, it was not uncommon for the deeds to be hidden or concealed in transit to ensure they would not fall into the wrong hands, as the actual holder of the deeds was deemed the rightful owner. On the way, legend has it, Thomas Horner delved into the pie and pulled out the deed for a plum piece of real estate, Mells
Manor House in the village of Mells, Somerset. And that, apparently, is all he needed to do to become the new lord of that manor.
But the bribe failed and in January 1539 Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, sent his royal commissioners to Glastonbury to see for themselves what was actually going on down in darkest Somerset. As a result of what they found, W
hyting was sent to the Tower of London so that Cromwell could question the abbot in person, and from there he was returned to Glastonbury on 14 November 1539. The following day he was tried for treason, with Thomas Horner as one of the jurors, and found guilty within only a few hours.
That afternoon, Richard Whyting and two of his senior monks, Roger James and John Thorne, were dragged by horses to the top of Glastonbury Tor, where they were hanged, drawn and quartered. Abbot Whyting’s head was then displayed above the gates of the deserted abbey as a reminder to others to obey the king without question. Meanwhile Thomas Horner was presumably busy making his removal arrangements.
Unsurprisingly, the descendants of Thomas Horner, who still live at Mells Manor, dismiss the legend as ‘pure fantasy made up by the Victorians’. Jack’s honesty, it is claimed, is supported by John Leland’s Itinerary (1540-46), a study of ancient buildings and monuments presented to Henry in 1549 that states: ‘Mr. Horner hath boute [bought] the lordship of the King.’ An alternative account suggests that the king gifted the manor to Horner and that the original title deed, bearing the royal seal, survives in the family’s possession to this day.
Note: During the 1500s, the slang term for £1,000 was ‘plum’, just as in modern terms a ‘score’ is £20 and a ‘monkey’ £500. Back in the sixteenth century, £1,000 was a seriously large sum of money, as well as being the fixed amount some politicians received for taking on certain government roles. This was considered by the average person as a vast sum of money for doing very little, and that is why these posts became known as ‘plum jobs’ or ‘plum roles’. The expression ‘plum’ has been used ever since to describe anything of great value that is usually gifted rather than earned.
