Why nursery rhymes are bad

They were obviously unsuccessful and were found out, and then burned at the stake for treason and heresy. It was mistakenly believed that she also blinded and dismembered them, as the rhyme goes, as if being burnt alive wasn't enough. The roots of this poem are so dark that they should not be allowed anywhere near children. And Jill, or Marie Antoinette's head soon came tumbling after. The origin for this rhyme is by far the most infamous. The rhyme refers to the Great Plague of London in While this rhyme sounds innocent enough, it actually dates back to feudal England, and is not so innocent.

There was an extremely harsh wool tax imposed on the farmers back then by King Edward I in the 13th century. One-third of the wool was taken for the king or the Master, one-third for the Church or the Dame, and one-third for the farmers.

Old Mother Hubbard isn't even a woman, if the theories are to be believed. If you look into the origin of the songs we were encouraged to sing as children, it turns out a lot of them are way more disturbing than you ever realized. Most nursery rhymes have been around for a long time — in fact, in some cases their origins go back hundreds and hundreds of years.

They tend to change slightly over time, but the songs typically remain pretty recognizable through the ages. Of course, figuring out where exactly they came from, on the other hand, is sometimes less clear. However, over the years people have come up with lots of possible explanations for different nursery songs.

And while some are pretty simple — or just simple nonsense — some possible origins are downright creepy. It kind of makes you wonder how we wound up letting kids sing all of this stuff.

Here are 11 nursery rhymes and children's songs that are way more disturbing than you ever realized. I remember this song being illustrated in children's books with three men all bathing in one tub, so you might assume that this song is meant to be homoerotic, which would actually be kind of cool. And it was probably meant to imply that either "the butcher, the baker," and the "candlestick maker" were all spying on women bathing or were going to a peep show in town.

Which makes you think very differently about the "rub-a-dub-dub" line. There are a few stories about where this song might have come from, including the idea that comes from the Medieval wool trade, but one of them is that it has to do with the Atlantic slave trade. Which is so messed up I can't even handle it. This song might seem like an innocent song about gardening, but there's a good chance it originated as a political metaphor for Mary I of England, the oldest daughter of Henry VIII who ascended to the throne after his death.

A random sample of 10 popular nursery rhymes shows this. 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. In the original version, nothing was therefore left for the little shepherd boy who lives down the lane.

Black sheep were also considered bad luck because their fleeces, unable to be dyed, were less lucrative for the farmer. Rock-a-bye Baby refers to events preceding the Glorious Revolution. Goosey Goosey Gander is another tale of religious persecution but from the other side: it reflects a time when Catholic priests would have to say their forbidden Latin-based prayers in secret — even in the privacy of their own home. Ladybird, Ladybird is also about 16th Century Catholics in Protestant England and the priests who were burned at the stake for their beliefs.

In our own sanitised times, the idea of presenting these gritty themes specifically to an infant audience seems bizarre. It outraged the Victorians, too, who founded the British Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform and took great pains to clean up the canon. In largely illiterate societies, the catchy sing-song melodies helped people remember the stories and, crucially, pass them on to the next generation. Whatever else they may be, nursery rhymes are a triumph of the power of oral history.

And the children merrily singing them to this day remain oblivious to the meanings contained within.