Six Impossible Episodes: Mother Goose

A number of English-language poems are generally lumped together as “Mother Goose" poems. But was there an actual Mother Goose? And do any of these poems have historical references in them?  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We recently
got an email from listener Becky who included some episode suggestions,

(00:22):
and one of those suggestions really caught my eye. It
was the muffin Man, on whom the nursery rhyme is based.
And actually, my nine year old grandson thinks nursery rhymes
would make a perfect impossible episode series. And I thought,
you know what, Becky's grandson, you were correct. That is

(00:43):
a perfect impossible episode series. And it's been more than
six months since we have done a six Impossible episodes. Um,
if you're new to the show, that's when we round
up together six things that you know, maybe have something
in common, maybe don't, but for one reason or another,
I can't really each be their own episode. So you
know it's time for one of those. We're going to

(01:04):
talk about nursery rhymes. And just to level set, we
are focused on English language poems for young children. Here
the ones that are generally lumped together as mother Goose,
although there are similar poems in other languages like, that's
a little outside our scope today, right, And before we
get to the muffin man, we have to ask the

(01:24):
more general question who was this Mother Goose? Anyway? In
the US, in particular, she is associated with short, often
nonsensical rhymes for young children, many of which purportedly have
hidden historical meanings. But where did that connection come from?
So one very widely spread but untrue version of this

(01:47):
is that Mother Goose was from Boston, Massachusetts. There is
a gravestone at the Granary burying Ground that has become
known as Mother Goose's grave. It is the gravestone of
Mary Goose, who was the first wife of Isa Goose.
He may have actually been known by the last name
ver Goose or Vertigoose also, and Mary Goose died in

(02:08):
sixteen ninety at the age of forty two. Just going
to tell you now, I'm putting the name Vertigoose on
my list of possible future pet names. So it was good.
A lot of the debunking of this whole idea focuses
on this gravestone and how Mary Goose was definitely not
Mother Goose. But some of those debunkers go on to
say that Mother Goose was really Isaac's second wife, Elizabeth

(02:30):
Foster Goose. Isaac and Mary had ten children together before
she died, and then Isaac and Elizabeth had six more.
According to the lore, Elizabeth entertained all of those kids,
that's sixteen if you were doing the math, and then
their kids with all kinds of stories and songs and rhymes,
which were published as a book in seventeen But that

(02:52):
is not true either, And getting to the bottom of
that took me down and enormous and convoluted at a
hole which now everyone listening to the show gets to
go along with. Also, the first place that I found
this whole story beyond just a couple of sentence recap
that basically went here's the story. It's not true, was

(03:15):
in The Only True Mother Goose Melodies without addition or abridgment,
embracing also a relatable life of the Goose family never
before published. This book was published by Monroe and Francis
of Boston, and the title page has this statement down
at the bottom. Quote entered according to Act of Congress
in the year eighteen thirty three by Monroe and Francis

(03:39):
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.
There are lots of copies of this book in the
collections of various libraries, and there are multiple scans of
it online, and they generally list its publication year as
eighty three. But it's relatable Life of the Goose Family
was not never before published as claim. It was reprinted

(04:01):
from the Boston Evening Transcript, which ran it under the
headline Cotton Mother and Mother Goose and the byline requiescat.
This piece starts by mentioning that transcript correspondent N. B.
S That's initials had recently confirmed the birthplace of Cotton Mather,
and then it just makes this hard turn onto the

(04:22):
topic of the Goose family and Mother Goose. Here's a
quote quote. The first book of the kind known to
be printed in this country bears the title of Songs
for the Nursery or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children, something
probably intended to represent a goose with a very long
neck and mouth wide open. Covered a large part of

(04:42):
the title page at the bottom of which printed by T.
Fleet at his printing house, Putting Lane seventeen nineteen, price
two coppers. Several pages were missing, so that the whole
number could not be ascertained. It goes on to talk
about Thomas Fleet fleeing in Lynn following the riots that
broke out after the trial of controversial clergyman Henry so Cheval,

(05:06):
and then it circles back to what any of this
has to do with Cotton. Mother Mother officiated the marriage
of Thomas Fleet to Elizabeth Goose, oldest daughter of Isaac
and Elizabeth. This piece concludes, quote Cotton Mother and Mother
Goose thus stand in juxtaposition, and as the former was
instrumental in cementing the union which resulted in placing the

(05:30):
latter so conspicuously before the world, it is but just
that it should be so. Although the one was a
learned man, a most voluminous writer, and published a great
many books, some wise and some foolish, it may well
be doubted whether anyone or all of them together have
passed through so many editions, been read by so many

(05:53):
hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, put so many
persons to sleep, or in general, done so much good
to the world as the simple melodies of the other.
This whole thing is a little weird. It's purportedly about
the Goose family and Mother Goose, but there is also
this kind of strained connection to Puritan minister Cotton Mother.

(06:15):
It insults Elizabeth Goose, saying that her singing was quote
greatly to the annoyance of the whole neighborhood, to Fleet
in particular, who was a man fond of quiet. And
it insults Cotton Mother, suggesting that he was less influential
than Mother Goose, who, as the writer had already established,
was annoying. By extension, it insults NBS. That's a genealogist,

(06:39):
historian and future mayor of Boston, Nathaniel Bradstreet shirtlift for
bothering to care about where Cotton Mother was born in
the first place. To make it weirder, this piece does
not seem to have existed in eighteen thirty three, when
the book that it was in was supposedly published. It
was printed in the Boston trans Script on January four,

(07:01):
eighteen sixty. We've talked on the show before about old
newspapers reprinting work without acknowledging what they were doing, but
it really doesn't seem like that's what happened here, or
if it did, it was not reprinting something from nearly
as far back as eighteen thirty three, because at that
point Nathaniel brad Street Shirtlift was only twenty three years

(07:21):
old and was in medical school. He graduated in eighteen
thirty four, and his first printed work came out at
about that same time. But it was not about Cotton
mother's birthplace at all. It was an epitome of phrenology.
He did not start out publishing work on history and
genealogy until much later, possibly as late as eighteen forty nine.

(07:43):
In nineteen o nine, someone started trying to figure out
who wrote this Boston transcript piece, which by that point
had been reprinted in a lot of Mother Goose books.
They sent a query to the Transcripts Notes and Query section,
which ran on April tenth of that year, and that
read end quote in the reproduction by Lee and Shepherd
August five of the Monroe and Francis eighteen thirty three

(08:06):
edition of Mother Goose Melodies. Is an eight page note
history of the Goose family copied from the transcript, marked
copyright secured, and signed requiescat. Is it permissible at this
later date to say who requiescat was? The answer was
printed the following Saturday, April seventeen. Quote. It has been

(08:28):
handed down at the Transcript office that Lynd M. Walter,
the editor of the Transcript from eighteen thirty to eighteen
forty two, wrote an Addisonian style communication from himself to
himself to be printed in the paper of which he
was the editor, and that Requiescott was his signature he
sometimes used. It is presumable that the inquiry may refer

(08:52):
to the use of the same signature of a later
year than eighteen forty two. We don't really know whether
the Transcript was being intentionally kg or if they didn't
track down the Cotton Mather and Mother Goose piece in
their own archives to see what this letter writing was
asking about. In nineteen o nine, that truly might have
been an undertaking, especially if they were focused on the

(09:14):
completely wrong year of eighteen thirty three. But the reason
Walter stopped editing the paper in eighteen forty two is
that he died, so he's definitely not Requiescott. In this case,
it may have been a New York Times reporter who
sent this query, because The Times weighed in on all
this a week later, noting that Thomas Fleet's great grandson,

(09:36):
John Fleet Elliott, had revived this story about his ancestor
around eighteen sixty and that the only evidence for a
seventeen nineteen Mother Goose book was Elliott's statements and this
Boston transcript piece. It's possible that Requiascot was John Fleet Elliott.
Some sources just say this definitively, although they don't really

(09:59):
explain how they came to that conclusion. In the words
of the New York Times quote, evidently this is a
Boston joke, but there are other more serious interpretations as well.
In a Twitter thread in twenty nineteen, historian Caitlin G.
De Angelis made the argument that just before the Civil War,
Elliott made up this story to minimize both the greater

(10:21):
history of slavery in Massachusetts and his own family's connection
to it. Thomas Fleet had an enslaved workforce at his
home and at the printing shop where the seventeen nineteen
edition was supposedly printed. Of course, none of this is
mentioned in Elliott's story. Elliot claimed that this had been

(10:41):
part of his family's lore for years, and then in
eighteen fifty six he had been talking to some friends
about it in the offices of the Massachusetts Hospital Life
Insurance Company. He said that Edward A. Crowd and Shield
had overheard this conversation and came over to say he
had seen a copy of a seventeen nineteen book and

(11:01):
the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. But Crowded Shield
died in eighteen fifty nine, so when this story started
to spread after eighteen sixty, he was not around to
confirm it. Sort of convenient, as we said earlier, this
story was reprinted in a lot of Mother Goose collections

(11:22):
and in other publications after eighteen sixty, and it has
stuck around in spite of decades of attempts to debunk it.
In eighteen eighty eight, after almost thirty years of being
pestered about it, the American Antiquarian Society printed a clear
and annoyed sounding denial in its Report of the Librarian,
stating unequivocally that it had no seventeen nineteen Mother Goose

(11:44):
in its collections and never had. This report states that
the earliest Mother Goose in the Society's collection was one
printed by Isaiah Thomas in seventeen eighty six or seventeen
eighty seven. That date is unclear because the first twelve
pages of that book are missing. It is possible that
that is the work Crown and Shield saw and told

(12:05):
Elliott about, or it's possible that Elliott fabricated some impossible
to disprove back up about a conversation with the late
Crown and Shield when he was pressed for details later on.
The general conclusion at this point is that the supposed
seventeen nineteen Mother Goose collection printed by Thomas Fleet simply
did not exist. Among other things, and the words of

(12:29):
the preface to a later, completely different Mother Goose collection,
there's this explanation, which I dearly love quote. If there
had been an addition printed in Boston in seventeen nineteen,
we can safely say that Benjamin Franklin would have had
a copy. Not only was there no such book, and
Franklin's collections, Franklin apparently made no reference to Mother Goose

(12:53):
of any type and any of the written work that
he left behind. On top of all of this, the
name Other Goose has existed since at least the sixteen twenties.
In France, the first use of Mother Goose in writings
was in Charles Perrot's collection of fairy Tales, which is
printed in sixteen ninety seven and that had the subtitle

(13:14):
Le Comte de mamere Lloyd or Tales of My Mother Goose.
This book was translated into English in seventeen twenty nine. Yeah,
those were stories that we would probably call fairy tales
rather than nursery rhymes, things like Cinderella. But by the
mid seventeen hundreds, John Newberry had published Mother Goose's Melody

(13:35):
or Sonnets for the Cradle, and that is when the
name Mother Goose really started becoming so clearly associated with
nursery rhymes. The term nursery rhyme was first used in
writing in the book Nursery Rhymes from the Royal Collection,
and that was published for the Royal Museum in eighteen
twenty And if you're still wondering about that eighteen thirty

(13:56):
three publication date, that sparked a lot of confusion. During
this research, Monroe and Francis printed a lot of Mother
Goose editions, starting in the eighteen twenties and going right
up until eighteen forty five, with various material added or
changed around from one addition to the next. Many of
the poems had previously been printed by Isaiah Thomas in

(14:18):
seventeen eighty five, and that edition was mostly the same
as John Newberry seventeen sixty five volume. But the Monroe
and Francis collection was really the first collection of Mother
Goose rhymes to be distributed outside of a publisher's local area,
and it probably had as much to do with the
connection between Mother Goose and nursery rhymes as John Newberry's

(14:39):
earlier work After eighteen thirty three. A lot of these
different printings have the exact same copyright statement that we
read back at the beginning of the show, regardless of
when they were actually published, and some of these are
a little weird. As one example, one of the versions
that I found as I was trying to track down

(15:00):
what was going on with all this was Mother Goose's Melodies,
the only pure edition containing all that has ever come
to light of her memorable writings, together with those which
have been discovered among the manuscripts of herculaneum. Likewise, everyone
recently found in the same stone box which hold the

(15:22):
golden plates of the Book of Mormon, the whole compared
revised and sanctioned by one of the annotators of the
Goose family. In theory all these others, like all these others,
this is probably published in three That might actually be
the case because it seems to be like a job
at the Latter day Saints roughly three years after the

(15:46):
Book of Mormon was first published. So after we take
a quick sponsor break, we're going to talk about some
famous rhymes and there possibly historical interpretations. So we're now
after that first impossible episode of who in the world

(16:10):
Mother Goose was? We're going to start the next impossible
thing in the series with that listener request on the
muffin Man. But before we do, we need another level set.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, more than
forty percent of the rhymes that were printed in that
dictionary were written down by the end of the seventeen hundreds,

(16:33):
but many of them were possibly passed along orally before
being written down. So it's really possible that the vast
majority of nursery rhymes that still exists in English today
that a lot of us know off the top of
our heads, are more than three hundred years old. And
even though many of these poems are hundreds of years old,

(16:54):
they weren't really the subject of much academic study until
more recently, and that happened intend with a rise in
scholarly research into folklore that happened in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and it's really during this wave
of research that people started writing about hidden meetings in
nursery rhymes, drawing from the poems, language and imagery. A

(17:15):
big contributor to this field was Katherine elw Was Thomas,
who published The Real Personages of Mother Goose in nineteen thirty.
But many scholars dismissed these kinds of conclusions out of
hand as hemorism. Ehemorists lived around three d b c.
And wrote a utopian work in which the Greek gods

(17:36):
were really mortal people who were worshiped after their deaths
because they had just really incredible accomplishments in their lives.
So humorism is the interpretation of myths as though they
document actual real historical people, or in this case, interpreting
nursery rhymes as though they depict actual historical events. In

(17:56):
other words, sometimes this really seems like more of an
inter rotation of a poem than an actual documented connection
to a real historical person. Yeah, I kind of chalk
this up to pattern recognition, right where it's like, absolutely,
this is very similar to this thing that happened historically,
but there's no there's no real evidentiary link. Yeah, So

(18:20):
with that caveat, we're going to move right into the
muffin Man. Do you know the muffin Man, The muffin Man,
the muffin Man. I'm not gonna sing it. Do you
know the muffin Man who lives on Drury Lane? Yes,
I know the muffin Man, the muffin Man, the muffin Man. Yes,
I know the muffin man who lives on Drury Lane.
According to the Singing Game by folklorists Iona and Peter Opie,

(18:44):
also known as the Opies, the oldest known copy of
this rhyme is in the collection of the Body and Library,
and it dates back to eighty It's phrasing is slightly different, though,
it's don't you know rather than do you know the
muffin Man? Even though neither of us is going to
sing on this episode. This rhyme seems to have started

(19:05):
out as a singing game with people standing in a
circle and one person would sing the do you know
part to the person standing on one side of them,
and that person would answer yes, I know back at them,
before turning to the person on their other side and
starting it over again, like a game of telephone sort of,
but repeating these same two verses over and over for

(19:28):
as long as people could not fall over themselves laughing.
I think might not take very long, because this is
very silly. In early versions of the song, the Muffin
Man actually lived on Crumpet Lane instead of Drury Lane,
with crumpets and muffins both being baked goods and Drury
Lane being in an actual real street in London. I

(19:48):
would like to visit Crumpet Lane. It is possible that
the query that started this whole episode stemmed actually from
a TikTok video about the Muffin Man that started circulating
in January one, claiming that this song was meant to
warn children about a real serial killer named Frederick Thomas
Lynnwood who killed fifteen children and seven rival pastry chefs

(20:10):
in the sixteenth century, and he was purportedly known as
the Drury Lane Dicer. However, this information seems to have
come from a website called Encyclopedia, the Content Free Encyclopedia.
As of April, which is when I did this research,
the Encyclopedia entry for the Muffin Man starts with a

(20:31):
quote that has attributed to Oscar Wilde, who supposedly said quote,
his muffins suck, his pastry sucks. He sucks. He didn't,
he didn't say that. There's also a photo that is
supposedly of Lynnwood that is credited as being taken by Witchcraft.

(20:53):
H this website does not document real information, and the
TikTok video that went really viral did not really make
that clear. I like photographs taken by Witchcraft. I mean
it seems totally legitimate to me. Right. This is really
probably just a silly song about baked goods, possibly alluding

(21:14):
to a real baker who lived in the vicinity of
Covent Garden in London. No evidence there was any serial
killer involved. Definitely not. And now we're going to move
on to Ring around the Rosy. And while this is
probably the most well known nursery rhyme backstory, it also
seemed like we would get a lot of questions about
why we did not talk about it. If we did

(21:36):
not talk about it, a lot of folks in the
US learned this rhyme as ring around the rosy pocket
full of Posy's ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Oh
the memories I have of singing this song as a child,
But in most academic work and in other parts of
the world, the lyrics to this song go more like
ring a ring o roses, a pocket full of posy's

(22:00):
a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down like the
muffin man. This one is often sung with children holding
hands and moving in a circle and dramatically falling down
at the end, which frankly was always the best. Yes,
sometimes there is one child, presumably the rosy that it references,
in the middle of the circle. So there's a pretty
persistent idea that this rhyme is about the Great Plague

(22:23):
of London, or maybe the Black Death or some earlier
major outbreak of the plague. The ring of roses is
purportedly a rash that was the first symptom of illness,
and the posies are flowers and herbs that people carried
to protect themselves from bad air. The ashes ashes is
about the ashes of burned bodies, or if you're doing

(22:45):
the a tissue version, that's a reference to sneezing, which
was supposed supposedly like you're in the stage ubonic plague
involved sneezing for some reason, and then we all fall
down because we have died. Yeah, we should point out
to that that a tissue is not tissue like a
piece of tissue, but it's meant to be like a

(23:06):
phonetic of what it sounds like when you see it's
like an automatopia for sneezing. Yeah, it's a t I
s h o o um like shoe. But the plague
did not cause a rosy rash or sneezing, and no
references connecting this song to the plague exists until the
mid twentieth century. According to Snopes, the first instance was

(23:27):
in James Lesour's The Plague and the Fire, and that
came out in ninete. Meanwhile, the earliest versions of the
rhyme itself date back to England in the eighties. That's
more than two hundred years after the Great Plague of
London and five hundred years after the Black Death. Has
a long time to go between when the thing happened

(23:48):
and when this appeared in writing for the first time.
These early versions also very a lot. Once you get
past the ring or ring a rose is a pocket
full of Posy's part, there are lines in different versions
about everything from Moses to fairy crowns to girls name Josie.

(24:10):
There's an eight eight three version from the US that
starts ring around the rosie, then the next line is
squat among the posies with Josie. By the late eighteen hundreds,
there were dozens of versions of this poem in circulation,
many of them, as Tracy just pointed out, wildly different
from one another, none of which seem to have anything

(24:31):
at all in common with the plague. And there are
also nineteenth century poems from other parts of Europe, including Italy, Germany, France,
and Switzerland that start out very similarly to ring a
Ring of roses, but then they go into totally different
and again very non plague related directions. So the most
commonly accepted interpretations of this poem are a little more vague.

(24:55):
But it's just kind of a reference to springtime festivals
that involved dancing in circles, or maybe folklore that was
connected to things like flowers or fairy rings. The mischievous
part of me wants to write a very serious seeming
analysis of this where it's actually about pressing your own
liquor using flower pedals and then you're so drunk you

(25:18):
fall down. Yeah, that it towards like real historical research. Yeah,
this one in particular reminds me of tweets that I
see from time to time that say I was today
years old when I found out blah, and it's a
thing that person observed and they made a connection about something,

(25:40):
and it's like, but that's not that's not real. Actually,
Arby's was not coined for RB, standing for roast beef.
It was the brothers that founded the restaurant chain. And uh,
and that's the thing that you saw that seemed like
the logical explanation, but is not the correct one, right,

(26:03):
So moving on, we mentioned the real personages of Mother
Goose by Katherine Elwis Thomas earlier. Neither of those last
two nursery rhyme interpretations have anything to do with her work,
and it would be a real disservice to leave anybody
with the impression that they did. Thomas's work is extensively
researched and footnoted with cross references between oldest known copies

(26:24):
of nursery rhymes and actual primary source documents. She did
a really good job. So it is neither made up
like the muffin Man story, nor based on any vague
ideas about the plague, as is the case with Ring
around the Rosie. At the same time, there are other
scholars of folklore, history and literature who find her work
and other similar work, to be speculative at best. Yeah,

(26:47):
there's a there's a lot. I mean, the word bodily
and appears in that book like hundreds of times in
references to documents that are in that library and the
first appearances of poems ever in writing, and uh and
all that. But still sometimes it's like, okay, but it's
not clear how you got from point A to point
B in in this very well documented series of connections.

(27:12):
So chapter three of her book, The Real Personages of
Mother Goose is about Little Jack Horner, and that's the
poem that goes Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
eating his Christmas pie. He put in his thumb and
pulled out a plum and said, what a brave boy
am I? Some versions including the one that I learned
as a child and on what a good boy rather

(27:34):
than brave boy? And according to Thomas Jack Horner was
Thomas Horner, steward to Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, and during
the dissolution of the monasteries. The abbot tasked him with
carrying a dozen deeds to King Henry the Eighth. These
deeds represented land that the Church was seeding to the

(27:56):
crown in order to appease the king. Because travel was
not particularly safe, the twelve deeds were concealed, according to
the poem, in a pie along the way. Horner, whether
accidentally or on purpose, reached in and pulled out the
deed to the estate of Mills Park, which became home
to the Horner family for the next five centuries. The abbot,

(28:18):
who had sent him on this errand was later drawn
through the town on a hurdle and executed, And although
the accounts of the day don't say that it was
because there was a deed missing in the king's delivery,
Thomas makes that connection. And she also connects the idea
of the Christmas pie to a letter from Richard Pollard

(28:38):
to Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and Vicar of General
Church Affairs under Henry the Eighth, detailing the execution before
saying quote, I suppose it will be near Christmas before
I shall have surveyed the lands of Glastonbury. This story
about Jack Horner has been around for a while. It
shows up in notes and queries in the eighteen eighties,

(28:59):
and there are early versions of the poem with pretty
similar words dating back at least one years earlier than that.
That is still much later than the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
which took place from fifteen thirty six to forty one,
but Thomas also draws in much older poems that reference
plums and December and treason in some way as a

(29:20):
sort of bridge. Thomas also maintains that this is the
house that Jack built, Jack be Nimble, and Jack the
Giant Killer may all be about this same man. To me,
it's equally probable that Jack was a very common ra
and a very common nickname used for just about everybody
at the same time. There's also another poem called Nanby

(29:43):
Panby a panegyric on the New versification, addressed to a
p Esquire. This was written by Henry Carey in the
seventeen twenties, and it contains a really similar passage to
this nursery rhyme that starts now he sings of Jackie
Horner sitting in the chimney corner. Namby Pamby was a
satire of the work of Ambrose Phillips doesn't seem to

(30:05):
have a huge connection to the dissolution of the monasteries,
and the Horner family, for their part, has maintained that
the family legally purchased this property in three they did
not steal it from the king. There's historical documentation about
that part up. Also, they've pointed out that their ancestor, Thomas,
was not known as Jack and that he took the

(30:28):
pie being that delivery, he took that to Henry the eighth. Intact,
they sort of regard this whole idea that this poem
is about their ancestor being basically a slander onto their family. Okay,
let's take a break and then we'll come back and
get some rocket by baby time. In moving on, I

(30:55):
picked the two other rhymes that we're going to talk
about in this episode because they're possible backstories or topics
we have covered before on the show. And first up
is rockabye Baby on the treetop. When the wind blows,
the creator will rock. When the bow breaks, the cradle
will fall, and down will come baby cradle and all.

(31:15):
In some versions that starts out hushaby instead of rockabye.
This poem has been around since at least seventeen sixty five,
and it's one of the ones that often comes up
as an example when people talk about how scary and
weird and violent nursery rhymes can be. People sing this
as a lullaby, but it is about a baby falling
out of a tree. So a popular interpretation of this

(31:38):
rhyme as that it is about James Francis Edwards Stewart,
son of King James the seventh of Scotland and second
of England, who was born on June tenth. King James
was Catholic, and when James Francis was born, that meant
that the Catholic king now had an heir, and that
was much to the disappointment of Protestants, who on it

(32:00):
a Protestant monarch. This led to a whole conspiracy theory
that the younger James was not to the king's son
at all, but was an impostor who had been sneaked
into the bed of James's wife, Mary of Modena in
a warming pan. We covered this in our episode on
the Jacobite Uprising of seventy So in this interpretation, the

(32:21):
cradle on the treetop is that warming pan that was
concealing the old pretender James Francis Edward Stewart, and that
the cradle and all fall at the end of it
is the fall of the House of Stuart after the
Glorious Revolution. But there's just really not a lot to
connect to the point A to point B here, as
I've sort of referenced earlier. Catherine Elis Thomas notes that

(32:44):
a longer poem that was printed in Poems and Songs
of the Bodily and Library titled Father Peter's Policy Discovered
or the Prince of Wales Proved a Popish Perkin, which
was first published in nine She She notes the similarities
in these two things, and a big similarity is that
each stanza of that poem ends with sing Lulla bye baby,

(33:09):
bye bye bye. But honestly, that seems like a pretty
tenuous connection to a different poem that first appeared in
print a hundred years later, right, It's like, well, there
are syllables that are the same. Other proposed interpretations involved
real babies in trees. There's the Kenny family who worked

(33:33):
as charcoal burners and lived in and around a yu
tree in Derbyshire in the eighteenth century and the Kenny's
purportedly used a hollowed out tree bow as a cradle.
Another conjecture, again without evidence, is that this poem really
has its origins in North America rather than the UK,
and that it's based on indigenous peoples using cradle boards.

(33:54):
Since the poem first appeared in print in England, that
would mean someone had either returned to Land after traveling
to North America or someone in North America had written
to someone in England about this practice. Yeah. So again
all of this is really speculative. And to move on
to our last mother goose rhyme for today, there's Mistress Mary.

(34:16):
Quite contrary, how does your garden grow with silver bells
and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row?
I also learned this with slightly different words when I
was a kid, because it started Mary Mary rather than
Mistress Mary, and it said little maids instead of pretty maids. Um.
Now I also learned it Mary Mary. But I I

(34:39):
have a vague recollection of one side of my family
using little in one side using pretty And maybe they're
being a pretty serious discussion with a cousin about the
whole situation. Yeah, because these are very important matters when
you're like nine um. One of the popular interpretations of
this poem is that it's about Mary, Queen of Scott's,

(34:59):
and that maids all in a row are her four
ladies in waiting. That's Mary Beaten, Mary Seaton, Mary Fleming
and Mary Livingstone, who accompanied her when she left for
the court of France in she was going to the
home of her fiance, Frances Dauphin of France, when both
Mary and Frances were still young children. And in this interpretation,

(35:20):
the bells and shells are described either as ornaments and
gifts she was given or, in the case of cockles,
of food that she was likely to eat. We've we've
talked about Mary, Queen of Scott's and a lot of
previous episodes of the show. There's also an interpretation that
this is about a different Mary, that it is Mary Tudor,

(35:41):
also known as Mary the First of England. He was
also nicknamed Bloody Mary, and in this interpretation, the silver
bells and the cockle shells are really references to torture
devices and not jewelry and ornaments and tasty food. In
the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the opies note that

(36:01):
this poem's first known appearance in writing dates back to
Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, which was published around set. That
makes it about two hundred years after both Mary Tutor
and Mary Queen of Scott's lived, and that first appearance
doesn't end with little Maids all in a row, it's
and so my garden grows. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery

(36:21):
Rhymes entry for this one actually starts off with the
idea that it might be a word picture of a
convent and a sentence that really could apply to pretty
much everything we've talked about today. The opi has described
those other possible explanations as quote. Such assertions are, of
course the work of the happy guessers. Who doesn't want

(36:42):
to be a happy guesser? Tracy. I'm so glad you
did this one, and I know you've said that, you know,
we may do another one of these someday because they're
fun and and you have already done the legwork. I'm
figuring out that hole who is mother goose tangle, and
we will we won't have to do that again. I'll
talk about that some more in our behind the scenes. Um.

(37:04):
I enjoy uh sometimes when I find something that's just
a tangle to try to figure out how to how
to explain it or what really happened. Um, this one
was inordinately tangled, and I spent way more time on
it than I was expecting. Um, so we'll talk a
bit more about that when we do our behind the scenes.

(37:26):
Do you also have a little bit of listener mail?
I knew, and it also was about a poem condensed coincidentally, Uh,
this came from Alicia, and Alicia says, high ladies. I
was listening to your January episode about Andrew Cross and
was shocked to hear you say the word hoblogy. It's
a word I learned as a child in a poem

(37:48):
taught to me by my grandmother, but I have never
met anyone outside my family who had ever heard it.
It's one of those knee bouncing rhymes. Incidentally, she said
it hoblogy. I think I might have said hobbogee in
the episode. I don't remember. My earliest memory of Grandma
is her bouncing me on her knee while reciting the rhyme.

(38:08):
It goes like this, Ladies go to market, trip, trip trip,
the gentleman come after them trot, trot, trot, Then come
the country clowns bringing taters to the town. Hoblogy. Hobblogy, hobbla,
hobbla hoblogy. My best guess is that this was passed
down through her mother's family, who came from England in
eighteen seventy seven, as I found a very similar version

(38:30):
in a book about nursery rhymes from Wales, across the
river from Andrew Cross's ancestral home. Anyway, I love that connection,
and it brought back fond memories of my grandma. And
while I'm writing, because I know you both love pet pictures,
i'd love to introduce you to my cat, Herschel, name
for Caroline Herschel, whom I learned about from your podcast.

(38:50):
The joke I like to tell is that he's named
for Caroline Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus with her brother,
who I leave unnamed. It's a cheeky push back against
all the women whose contributions in history have been downplayed
or forgotten while the credit has been given to their
male partners. No one gets that, though, and the jokes
are never funny after being explained. So I'm the only
one who laughs or maybe it's not even that funny

(39:12):
sigh um. And then we got a cat picture, so good,
look at this kitties, kitties. That cat has the sweetest face. Yeah. Uh.
And a little patch of for that if you're not
looking closely, almost looks like a bow on this print out.

(39:34):
Thanks for your wonderful podcast. I can't recommend it enough
to everyone I talked to you. Your well researched and
balanced look at complex people in situations have been refreshing.
Laughing all by myself over here, Alicia uh. And then
Alicia goes on to say that I especially enjoyed your
episode about the last Costmith. Thank you so much. I
had never heard that poem before, but boy do I

(39:56):
like the part about bringing the taters to town? Do
you love potatoes? Uh? If you would like to send
us an email about this, are anither podcast, were history
podcast that I Heart radio dot com. We're all over
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(40:18):
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