In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Stephen Coote’s English Literature of the Middle Ages
Stephen Coote’s English Literature of the Middle Ages (Pelican)
It took a train journey to Doncaster to get me reading Coote’s book, which I have been meaning to read for a while now.
What connects the popular Christmas carol ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and the popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’? They both share an origin – but the origins of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ are not as famous as the words. And the words themselves deserve closer analysis…
Once in Royal David’s City
Once in royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little Child.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse’: as opening lines go, they must be up there in the top five most famous opening lines from an American poem (something from Emily Dickinson would also have to be in there).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Who was Lucy Locket, and what is the deal with her pocket? How does one lose a pocket? We’re here to answer these and other important questions in today’s blog post, the latest in our series of posts analysing classic nursery rhymes. Today, as you might have guessed, it’s the turn of ‘Lucy Locket’, or ‘Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket’. So, here goes with the analysis:
This week, the paperback edition of our literary travelogue, Britain by the Book, was published by John Murray. In honour, here is a shortened version of one of the entries from the book…
The village of Yealmpton (pronounced ‘Yampton’) is a few miles east of Plymouth. Market Street boasts a house built around 400 years ago with something you don’t see everyday: a thatched dog on the roof. This is ‘Mother Hubbard’s Cottage’, and it was supposedly the home of the woman who inspired the nursery rhyme of Old Mother Hubbard.
I say ‘supposedly’ because it’s nearly always impossible to pin down a nursery rhyme’s origins in any definite way. ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ was one of the most popular publications of the entire nineteenth century, with sales in the tens of thousands within just a few months of publication. Its instant bestseller status may partly have stemmed from the public’s belief that it was some sort of political satire, but nobody seems to know what it was satirising. A sequel to the story was published very shortly after. It inspired rival productions, such as ‘The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Lantry and Her Wonderful Goat’, and gave its name to a style of dress (a loose-fitting smock) and, in Canada, a kind of duffel coat.