Nursery Rhymes n°3: Oranges and Lemons

It's amazing what you can do with mashed potato and lettuce. My dinner tonight consisted of:

- 2 potatoes, boiled and mashed with a fork
- bit of margerine
- bit of grated emmental (teh Interwebs recommend cheddar but that's extortionate over here)
- bit of chopped onion
- bit of paprika
- bit of salt
- bit of pepper

... all mixed up and heated in the microwave. And there was salad, with salad dressing, which I love. Recipe for salad dressing:

- 20 ml white wine vinegar (I used what was left in the gherkin jar)
- 60 ml olive oil
- small bit of finely chopped onion (well, not that finely chopped)
- bit of taragon
- teaspoon of mustard (à l'ancienne, that is, with the seeds in it)
- small bit of chopped garlic

Gorgeous.

Anyway. As you'll have guessed, today's nursery rhyme is Oranges and Lemons, which goes like this:

Oranges and lemons say the bells of saint Clements
You owe me five farthings, say the bells of saint Martins
When will you pay me, say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch
When will that be, say the bells of Stepney
I'm sure I don't know, says the great bell at Bow
Here comes the candle to light you to bed
Here comes the chopper to chop off your head
Chip, chop, chip, chop, the last man's dead!

Cool, right? I love this rhyme. It sounds so sinister. It used to scare me when I was little. And of course, it does have a rather morbid origin: the rhyme refers to the execution process in times when the death penalty was still legal in England. There's also a dance/game to go with it.


Oranges and lemons are unloaded on the warves next to St Clement's church.
Moneylenders traded near St Martin's church.
The prison near Old Bailey (the bell referred to in this line is actually the prison bell, the church didn't have one) housed both criminals and debtors.
Shoreditch was a very poor area of London.
A difficult one: Stepney had a close link to the sea, and "when will that be" may refer to wives waiting for their sailor husbands to come home with their fortune.
Bell at Bow... No idea why this means "I'm sure I don't know".
The candle refers to the arrival at midnight of a guard to announce which prisonners would be executed the next morning.
The chopper is pretty explicit.

If you want to know more, I highly recommend this site which not only interprets the rhyme, but goes into the history of each bell. Vair interestink.