Nursery Rhymes - what do they mean?

[LimeInTheCoconut]

Everyone knows that Ring-a-Roses was about the plague.

What about Goosey Goosey Gander? Who was the "old man who wouldn't say his prayers"?

Who was The Grand Old Duke of York?

The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown...?

Is there a good book that explains them all? The politics and the social history behind them?

If I'm going to spend hours of my life reciting the bloody things I might as well learn something.

Debi Gilori has a book of nursery rhymes with explanations ...

You need this book or one of the others by the Opie's. They are the experts on nursery rhymes and their origins and meanings.

Excellent. Thank you all.

And appologies for posting about something that was apparently easily google-able.

So, I suppose there won't be any new nursery rhymes now. We've got the ones we have which will eventually be too old fashioned and die out. But children hardly make up playground ditties about current affairs these days. Do children even play clapping games and skipping chants and elastics any more?

As to skipping & clapping games, the Great Big Glorious Book for Girls is a genuinely good resource - dd (7.5) loves it & takes ideas from there into school - from what she tells me hopscotch & cats' cradle & everything like that are alive & well.

I suppose it is a bit she has to find them in a book instead of its all being the organic vernacular of the playground, but so long as nothing is being lost ...

Catchphrases ("am I bovvered") are the contemporary nursery rhyme.

DD1 has come home from school singing several of the same playground rhymes that I learned 30+ years ago! But some of the morals have been updated:
x and y up a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
But that's not all, but that's not all
The baby's drinking alcohol

Someone told me the other day that the bit in ring-a-ring-o-roses about "fishes in the water" was originally "ashes in the water" - from the burning of plague-ridden bodies. I haven't felt quite the same about singing it at toddler group since then

Just checked my copy of the Oxford Book, and they are sceptical of the plague explanation for Ring o' Roses. From other European versions, it would seem the "all fall down" was originally a curtsy, making it equally likely that it's about dancing.

I'm not a historian, but I don't think plague bodies were burnt much/at all, so I doubt this is connected. At our toddlers, we sing "cows are in the meadow eating buttercups. Atishoo atishoo we all jump up" but I used to sing "ashes in the water" at school.