Traditionally passed on from parent to child, nursery rhymes are usually the extremely first verses that children hear. With their catchy rhythms and basic stories, they’re also easy to learn and also the best-known poems there are.

For hundreds of many years, adults have soothed and entertained infants with rhyming verses. Generations of older kids have chanted rhymes to accompany playground games. Many of these rhymes were not written down at all for centuries so we don’t always know precisely how old they’re or what they mean, but most of them originated far from the nursery.

Humpty Dumpty, for instance, is so old that no-one knows when he began, but he comes in numerous languages and started life as a riddle (the answer is egg). The black sheep happen to be baaing for hundreds of years and the little boy might have been a tax collector who began getting greedy in 1275. Jack Horner was most likely the dishonest servant of the Abbot of Glastonbury. The abbot sent Henry VIII a bribe to try to save his monastery: a pie in which he hid the title deeds to 12 farms.

Jack stole one of the deeds although taking the pie to London. Miss Muffet might be the daughter of Thomas Muffet who died in 1604 and was a great expert on spiders. Three blind mice started frightening the farmer’s wife about 300 many years ago in a ’round’, a kind of song. Mice probably started running up the clock in shepherds’ homes. Shepherds had their own numbers for counting sheep: hevera (eight), devera (nine), dick (10), for instance, might be the origin of ‘Hickory dickory dock’.

Mary has been contrary since at least 1744 when she first appeared in print. Some individuals think that this rhyme was originally a very nasty song about Mary Queen of Scots. Bo-Peep, nevertheless, probably did begin off in the nursery, as the game played with babies, hiding their faces and then saying ‘Peep-bo!’ or ‘Bo-Peep!’