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n Yesterday I mentioned Lord Chesterfield’s letters tonhis son and I’d like to begin today by quoting from one of the most familiar ofnthose letters – Letter XXX, dated February 22nd 1748 (Old Style),nwhich towards the end has this,
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n“Wear your learning, like your watch, in anprivate pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that younhave one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it; but do not proclaim itnhourly and unasked, like the watchman.”n
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nGood advice, indeed. Nobody likes anclever clogs. So, now I turn to a nasty little book by Norman Cantor called Innthe Wake of the Plague (2001).
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| Norman Cantor – In the Wake of the Plague – 2001 |
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nIn this volume Cantor’s takes his learning out ofnhis pocket and strikes it like a drunken campanologist. He is, (or was, he diednin 2004), we read in the blurb, Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology andnComparative Literature at New York University and Cantor is not backward atncoming forwards, letting us know about his former position as FulbrightnProfessor at Tel Aviv University and so forth.
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nIn the critical bibliography,nCantor sets about the works of previous writers about the Black Death withnundisguised relish. One book is dismissed as being ‘out of date’,nanother is ‘verbose, unfocussed and now out of date’. The next on hisnlist (I won’t give the titles or authors, out of respect for them), gets ‘Thentext could have been much better’, whereas the next is ‘puff pieces ofnspeculative nature’ and the list continues; ‘fragmentary and superficial’,n‘almost unreadable’ and perhaps most damning of all, ‘The best partnof this book is the pictures’.
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nWow, from this we’d expect Norman to be onnhis game in his own, as I say, nasty book (I call it that because it’s one thing to be ‘critical’ butnquite something else to be so downright nasty). Right, Chapter One and I quote,
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n“In the England of 1500 children were singing a rhyme and playing a gamencalled ‘Ring Around the Rosies [sic].’ When I grew up in Canada in the 1940s childrennholding hands in a circle still moved around and sang: Ring around the rosies, A pocketful of posies, Ashes, ashes, We all fall down. The origin ofnthe rhyme is the flulike symptoms, skin discolouring, and mortality caused bynbubonic plague. The children were reflecting society’s efforts to repressnmemory of the Black Death of 1348-49.”n
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nLet me stop you right there, Norman.nAs Emeritus Professor and Fulbright Professor and whatever else you’ve been,nyou should know the value of going back to the primary sources. Just where innEngland were these 1500s youngsters singing this rhyme? I only ask because thenearliest sources of the rhyme date from around about 1790, with the earliestnwritten source dating from Kate Greenaway’s 1881 book Mother Goose; or, thenOld Nursery Rhymes.
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| Kate Greenaway – Ring a Roses – from Mother Goose – 1881 |
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nThe great English folklorist Alice Gomme includes anvariety of versions collected throughout the English counties in hernmagisterial Traditional Games of England (1894) and compares them. Shennotes the ring of roses, speculating that the children making up the ring couldnstand for the rose children or sun children of pagan myth, and also notes thensneezing element that is common to them and how it changes in the Americannversions to ‘ashes, ashes’, and how this may be related to the many folknsuperstitions about the sneeze.
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| Alice Gomme – Ring o’ Roses – from Traditional Games – 1894 |
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nWhat she doesn’t do is mention either thenplague or the Black Death. And neither does anyone else. This is odd if, asnCantor tells us, this rhyme has been doing the rounds since the 1340s or, tonput it another way, since the days before Chaucer. Not one mention. Anywhere.nNot in Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Milton. Not in a poem, or a song, or a play.nThat’s a bit weird, don’t you think?
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| Ring o’ Roses |
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nIndeed, the first mention of the plaguentheory doesn’t come until after World War II, when the idea was first put aboutnthat the Ring of Roses referred to the circular rings that appeared under the armpitsnof the plague victims. The pocketful of posies were the bunches of herbsncarried to fend off the smell of the plague, the sneezing Atishoo, atishoo wasnthe ‘flulike’ sneezing before the plague finished you off, and ‘all fallingndown’ speaks for itself.
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| A Plague Doctor |
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nObviously. Except. With bubonic plague you don’t getnrings of roses under your arm. You get buboes but these are black or purplenswellings of the lymph nodes in the armpits and groin (hence the name, from thenGreek βουβών – boubos meaning groin). The posies could be posiesnof herbs, or the herbs stuffed into the beaks of plague doctors, or wreathesnplaced on graves, or even a euphemism for pus (posy – pusy), oozing out of the buboes. Ornsomething else that your fancy might like to apply to them. And sneezing? Notnwith bubonic plague. You might cough a lot with pneumonic plague, and you mightnshiver and shake a lot but not sneezing overly. And all falling down – well, itnrefers to the curtseying that happened in the children’s game. That’s beennrecorded in the past. But not falling down, as the plague would have alreadynforced you to take to your bed before you died. It was quick but not thatnquick.
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| Ring o’ Roses |
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nThe whole plague associations are a modern invention, making somethingnup from an existing rhyme by shoehorning a new interpretation onto it. And asnwith yesterday’s tale of the riots that didn’t take place, lazy historians haventaken it as read, without bothering to check their sources. Lazy, if you’re annundergraduate History student, unforgivable if you’re an Emeritus Professor ofnHistory. And not in Chapter One, if you expect us to give any credence tonwhatever follows next.
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