Why rhymes count
Counting is one of the easiest things to put into verse. A number gives a rhyme a ready-made structure: one thing, then two, then three, with the last line landing where the child expects it. Many traditional English rhymes use numbers in this way, from “One, two, buckle my shoe” to “Ten Green Bottles”. Often there is no need to look for anything beyond that. A number is a rhythm and a game.
Yet numbers in rhymes have also attracted a lot of interpretation. The reason is partly that old rhymes have unclear origins, and partly that numbers are specific enough to seem like a code. This article looks at a few well-known examples and at what can and cannot be said about them.
Sing a Song of Sixpence
The rhyme begins with a sixpence, a coin worth six old pence, or half a shilling. A pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, a king counting his money and a queen eating bread and honey follow.
The earliest known printing is generally dated to the middle of the eighteenth century, and the wording in that early version differs from the one known today. So the blackbirds, in particular, may be a later arrangement of the verse. The older number phrase “four and twenty” is simply the way twenty-four was spoken in earlier English, with the smaller unit first, a pattern still normal in German. It tells us the rhyme uses older number words, but it does not suggest a code.
Several theories attach hidden meanings to the verse. One reads the king as Henry VIII and the blackbirds as monasteries or officials; another makes the twenty-four blackbirds the hours of the day and the pie the sky; others connect the verse to Tudor politics. None of these has good documentary support. Folklorists such as Iona and Peter Opie, who compiled the standard reference on nursery rhymes in the mid-twentieth century, were generally cautious about such readings and pointed out that explanations are often attached to a rhyme long after it was first recorded.
A more modest observation is that medieval and early modern cookery included “surprise” dishes in which live birds were released from a baked pie crust at table. If the rhyme reflects this entertainment, the number of birds would be just a showy large number.
Magpies and folk counting
The magpie rhyme gives a different kind of counting. In its commonly quoted form it runs “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy”, and continues up the numbers, with the details changing from region to region. People have recorded many versions, with a different meaning attached to each count. This is a case where the variation itself is the evidence: the verse is a piece of folk belief in which the number of birds seen is read as an omen, and different places have fitted it to different outcomes. Like other number beliefs, it is a tradition, not a prediction.
The Twelve Days of Christmas
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a cumulative counting song, with each verse adding a gift. It was published in the late eighteenth century as a memory game in which players repeated the growing list and paid a forfeit for mistakes. A popular modern claim says that the gifts were a secret catechism for persecuted Catholics, with each number standing for a doctrine. No early evidence supports this, and historians of the song generally regard it as a later story. The twelve days themselves are a real feature of the Christian calendar between Christmas and Epiphany, and the song is connected to wider Christian number symbolism only in that loose sense.
Days, ages and other counts
Some rhymes use numbers as a list. “Monday’s child is fair of face” assigns a trait to each of the seven days of the week, in an order that has varied between versions. “Solomon Grundy”, born on Monday and buried on Sunday, compresses a whole life into the seven-day week. In neither case is the counting hidden; it is the framework. “Three Blind Mice” was printed in a collection of rounds in 1609, which shows that a numbered rhyme can be very old without any evidence that its number means more than it says.
Counting rhymes also overlap with counting-out rhymes, the games used to choose who is “it”, which are a separate tradition with their own history.
How to read a claimed meaning
A few habits help when someone says a rhyme has a secret meaning.
- Look for the earliest printed version. If the claimed event is much older than the first text, the link is probably guesswork.
- Ask whether the interpretation requires every number to match. A theory that fits some lines and ignores others is weaker than it first appears.
- Notice that rhyme and rhythm explain many choices. “Four and twenty” fits the metre, and a different number might not.
- Be cautious about confident dates. Many rhymes are recorded only once they were printed, which may be long after they began to circulate by speech.
Nursery rhymes are best treated as a living folk tradition. The numbers in them teach counting, supply rhythm and sometimes record old habits of speaking, such as how people once said twenty-four. Whether they also hide history is, in most cases, unproven, and anyone who states it as fact is going beyond the evidence. Part of the appeal of the topic is that the rhymes remain playful and open: children can learn to count from them without needing any hidden story, and number words survive in the verses long after the occasions that produced them have been forgotten.