It Is Not About the Plague

Every English person knows that ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ is about the Black Death.

The rosy rash. The posies of herbs carried against infection. The sneezing that was the last symptom before death. And then they all fall down.

It is a wonderfully grim thing to be told as a child, and it is not true.

The problem with the reading

Three difficulties, and any one of them would be serious.

The first is the date. The rhyme does not appear in print until the later nineteenth century. That is five hundred years after the plague of 1348 and two hundred after the outbreak of 1665.

Absence from print is not proof of absence from speech — the Opies were careful about this, and rhymes circulate for a long time before anybody writes them down. But the gap is enormous, and the plague was extensively written about by people who wrote down a great deal else.

The second is the variants. Folklorists have collected a large number of versions of this rhyme, across Britain and Europe and America, and they differ substantially. Many have no sneezing in them at all. Several do not end with everybody falling down; they end with everybody standing up again, or with the players jumping, or with a line about the cows in the meadow.

The plague reading depends entirely on a particular sequence of particular words, and that sequence is one version among many, and not the oldest.

The third is that the interpretation itself has a traceable history, and it does not begin until the twentieth century. Nobody in the nineteenth century, collecting and annotating these rhymes with great enthusiasm, mentions the plague. The reading appears, becomes popular, and is then repeated until it is common knowledge.

Where the others came from

‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ is said to be about Mary I, with the silver bells and cockle shells as instruments of torture and the garden as a graveyard. Or about Mary, Queen of Scots, with the garden as her court. Both are asserted, neither is documented.

‘Three Blind Mice’ is said to be the three Oxford Martyrs burned under Mary. There is no contemporary support for this and the rhyme’s first printing is in the early seventeenth century in a form that does not fit.

‘Humpty Dumpty’ is said to be a large cannon mounted on the church tower at Colchester during the Civil War, brought down by parliamentary fire. This is repeated everywhere, including on local information boards. It appears to originate in the twentieth century and has no seventeenth-century source whatsoever.

‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ is said to be about the medieval wool tax. ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ is said to be about pawning a coat, or a tailor’s tool, or a spinner’s weasel. ‘Goosey Goosey Gander’ is said to be about priest holes.

A great many of these historical identifications trace back to one book: Katherine Elwes Thomas’s The Real Personages of Mother Goose, published in 1930, which asserted political originals for a long list of rhymes and was enormously influential and is not regarded by anybody in the field as reliable.

What the Opies said

Iona and Peter Opie went through all of this in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes in 1951, which remains the standard work, and their conclusion was clear and rather patient.

The rhymes are old, frequently much older than their first appearance in print, and often international — the same rhyme turns up in German or French or Danish, which rather undercuts a reading based on English political history.

But the specific historical allegories are, with very few exceptions, modern guesses presented as discoveries. There is no chain of evidence. There is an assertion in a book, repeated.

Why we want them

It is the same mechanism as the Padstow horse and the Abbots Bromley antlers.

A nursery rhyme is a piece of nonsense that a whole population knows by heart and cannot account for. It feels as though something that universal must mean something, and the meaning must have been lost, and if it has been lost it can be recovered.

So an explanation is supplied. And a good explanation has certain qualities: it is dark, it is specific, it involves a known historical horror, and it produces the pleasant sensation of having seen through something.

Then it spreads, because it is a better story than the truth, and the truth is that children have always chanted rhythmic nonsense while going round in a circle.