![]() (In the original version, nothing was therefore left for the little shepherd boy who lives down the lane). ![]() Under the new rules, a third of the cost of a sack of wool went to him, another went to the church and the last to the farmer. A random sample of 10 popular nursery rhymes shows this.īaa Baa Black Sheep is about the medieval wool tax, imposed in the 13th Century by King Edward I. But what about those twisted lyrics and dark back stories? To unpick the meanings behind the rhymes is to be thrust into a world not of sweet princesses and cute animals but of messy clerical politics, religious violence, sex, illness, murder, spies, traitors and the supernatural. ![]() So when modern parents expose their kids to vintage nursery rhymes they’re engaging with a centuries-old tradition that, on the surface at least, is not only harmless, but potentially beneficial. “When we sing, we're participating in something that bonds parent and child.” “It is a way of completing the world through rhyme,” he said in an interview on the website of NBC’s Today show last year. Seth Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University California – San Diego, has also emphasised the ability of nursery rhymes to foster emotional connections and cultivate language. According to child development experts Sue Palmer and Ros Bayley, nursery rhymes with music significantly aid a child's mental development and spatial reasoning. The distinctive sing-song metre, tonality and rhythm that characterises ‘motherese’ has a proven evolutionary value and is reflected in the very nature of nursery rhymes. There is no human culture that has not invented some form of rhyming ditties for its children. The first nursery rhyme collection to be printed was Tommy Thumb's Song Book, around 1744 a century later Edward Rimbault published a nursery rhymes collection, which was the first one printed to include notated music –although a minor-key version of Three Blind Mice can be found in Thomas Ravenscroft's folk-song compilation Deuteromelia, dating from 1609. That’s when the earliest nursery rhymes seem to date from, although the ‘golden age’ came later, in the 18th Century, when the canon of classics that we still hear today emerged and flourished. Babies falling from trees? Heads being chopped off in central London? Animals being cooked alive? Since when were these topics deemed appropriate to peddle to toddlers? But probably right at this moment, mothers of small children around the world are mindlessly singing along to seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes that, if you dig a little deeper, reveal shockingly sinister backstories. Plague, medieval taxes, religious persecution, prostitution: these are not exactly the topics that you expect to be immersed in as a new parent.
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