Origin of Little Boy Blue

Introduction to Art, Music and Literature

Jewell Smith Hunter

Origin of Nursery Rhymes

HUM 100

Doctor George Weimer

January 31, 2011

The Nursery Rhyme

Little Boy Blue come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow the cow's in the corn.

But where's the boy who looks after the sheep?

He's under a haystack fast asleep.

Will you wake him? No, not I - for if I do, he's sure to cry

Little Boy Blue Nursery Rhyme: The Origin

The earliest printed version of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb's Little Song Book (c. 1744), but the rhyme may be much older. It may be alluded to in Shakespeare's King Lear (III, vi) when Edgar, masquerading as Mad Tom, says:

Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepheard?

Thy sheepe be in the corne;

And for one blast of thy minikin mouth

Thy sheepe shall take no harme.[1]

The words and story of Little Boy Blue cannot be positively connected to any historical figure in history but there is, however, a theory that 'Little Boy Blue' refers to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

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(1475-1530) dating back to English Tudor history and the reign of King Henry VIII. Wolsey was an extremely rich and arrogant self-made man with many enemies at court and was unpopular with the people of England. He was called the "Boy Bachelor" after obtaining his degree from Oxford at the unusually early age of fifteen. The expression "Blowing one's own horn" meaning to brag was certainly practiced by Cardinal Wolsey. Between 1514 and 1525 he transformed a medieval manor into the magnificent Hampton Court Palace. It was an ostentatious display of his wealth and his power giving rise to the rhyme uttered by his enemies:

"Come ye to court? Which Court?

The King's Court or Hampton Court?"

The anti-Wolsey propaganda worked and in 1529 Henry declared all of Wolsey's lands and possessions forfeit and they became the property of the Crown. At this time England was a prosperous nation largely through the wool trade and the...