London: The Biography

The songs, as well as the calls and cries, of children are part of the general sound of the city. “Home againe home againe market is done” must rival for antiquity “On Christmas night I turn the spit” or “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.” In 1687 John Aubrey wrote that “Little children have a custome when it rains to sing, or charme away the raine; thus they all join in a chorus and sing thus, ‘Raine, raine, go away, come againe a Saterday.’” There are a great many songs and rhymes set specifically in London; this is perhaps not surprising, since the city had the largest congregation of children in the nation and, eventually, in the world. It has been stated by those authorities on childhood matters, Iona and Peter Opie, that most of these rhymes can be dated after 1600; certainly they emanated from London printer-publishers of the period, one of whom was jocularly known as “Bouncing B, Shoe Lane.”

But there are more significant urban features of these songs. They emanate from the street cries and ballads of London; their context is that of an oral culture. Some rhymes relate indirectly to wars or to political matters, while others refer to urban events such as an “Ice Fair” upon the Thames, or the burning “of a bridge of London town” in February 1633. Other songs came from the London theatres, such as “There was a jolly miller” and “When I was a little boy, I washed my mammy’s dishes.” “The house that Jack built” was originally the title of a London pantomime. In fact there were so many pantomimes and harlequinades-Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog, Harlequin and Little Tom Tucker, and a host of others-that it could be presumed that Londoners themselves had become like little children.

The printers of Shoe Lane, Paternoster Row and elsewhere issued a stream of story-books and song-books, catching the young with their usual commercial spirit, and again the presence of London filled their pages. “O was an oyster girl, and we went about town,” from an eighteenth-century spelling book, is only the plainest of a number of verses or songs which celebrated London trades and tradespeople. There are children’s songs on the milkmaids of Islington and the sweeps of Cheapside, as well as the tailors, the bakers and the candlestick-makers. Some of them begin “As I was going o’er London Bridge” as a great metaphor for the highway of life, but of course the most ancient and familiar is the mysterious song

London Bridge is broken down,

Broken down, broken down,

London Bridge is broken down,

My fair lady.

In its twelve verses it evokes a bridge that is continually being destroyed and rebuilt. Thus “Wood and clay will wash away … Bricks and mortar will not stay … Iron and steel will bend and bow … Silver and gold will be stolen away.” Why should such strange sentiments issue from the mouths of London children, unless it be a reference to the ancient belief that only the sacrifice of a child can placate the river and preserve the bridge unnaturally set across it? The Opies themselves suggest that the song “is one of the few, perhaps the only one, in which there is justification for suggesting that it preserves the memory of a dark and terrible rite of past times”; they then describe the connection of child-sacrifice with the building of bridges. So the singing child is alluding to a dreadful destiny within the city, and perhaps there is also an intimation that London itself can only be reared and protected by the sacrifice of children.

There is some element of this fatal relationship in that other great London song, “Oranges and Lemons,” where the invocation of old London churches reaches a climactic moment with the lines

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Again the origins of this verse are mysterious. It has been suggested that they allude to the journey of a condemned man to the scaffold, when the bells of London rang out to mark the stages of his progress, or that in some way the song commemorates the bloody marital career of Henry VIII. Yet its power resides in its almost magical invocation of sacred places, with their names ringing out like an incantation. “Ring ye Bells at Whitechapple … Ring ye Bells Aldgate” as well as those at St. Catherine’s, at St. Clement’s, at Old Bailey, at Fleetditch, at Stepney and at Paul’s. A sacred as well as ferocious city is being invoked. It could be suggested, then, that death was often in the minds of London children.

“Pray, do tell me the time, for I have let my watch run down.”

“Why, ’tis half an Hour past Hanging-time, and time to hang again.”

In one of those silent patterns of oral mnemonics “hanging” became “kissing,” although of course the halter was known as “the kiss” or “the cheat.”