London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Everyone knows the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, we’ve sung it since we were five years old, but the meaning behind it is a little harder to pin down.
Theories abound (and, as is the way of such things, theories are confidently asserted as fact) but, as with so much to do with London, once you start digging into the subject you’re left with nothing tangible, just the shadows of long standing myths.
The poem laments the destruction of the bridge and offers a variety of solutions to rebuilding it, most of which are discounted – “Build it up with iron bars … iron bars will bend and break”, “Build it up with gravel and stone…Gravel and stone will wash away” etc – finally settling on rebuilding the bridge with silver and gold, which will then need a ‘watchman’ to make sure this isn’t stolen, the watchman being given a pipe to stop him dropping off to sleep overnight. An alternate version (popular rhymes are always fluid and evolving) has “Build it up with stones so strong…Stones so strong will last so long”, this being a nice nod to Peter de Colechurch’s stone bridge that stood over the river for 600 years from the early 13th century.
The rhyme is first seen in print in 1744 in ‘Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book’. We don’t know how long the song (or a version of it) was sung before it was set down in print, but its appearance there tells us that this was already a well known and presumably long-established favourite. (Other rhymes that make their first appearance in print in the book include Baa Baa Black Sheep, Oranges and Lemons, and Sing a Song of Sixpence.) There are possible references to it in some 17th century works as well, so we can deduce a long history.
It’s in the nature of these things that people want to divine a ‘true meaning’, to discover the hidden history behind the children’s rhyme (see also the widely held belief that “Ring a ring a roses” is to do with the plague), and suggestions for origins of ‘London Bridge’ include:
- Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, a deeply unpopular consort who was given control of the bridge’s revenues in the 1270s, spending those on herself rather than repair and maintenance of the bridge
- Queen Matilda (Maud), wife of Henry I, who built bridges across the River Lea (early versions of the rhyme had the line “dance over my Lady Lea”)
- That the man who is set to watch – in the playground version of the rhyme this man is ‘captured’ when the children walk through the arch formed by the arms of two of them – represents the sacrifice of a child, who would be buried in the foundations of a new bridge to protect it. (This was a belief popularised by Alice, Lady Gomme, a Victorian folklorist.) This seems to be a case of taking 2 + 2 and making 37.
- And the theory that has gained the most currency in recent years, which is to do with an assault on the bridge in 1014 by Olaf Haraldsson, King Olaf II of Norway, later St Olaf.
The ‘Olaf theory’ comes from a saga about the king called the Heimskringla written by the 13th century Icelandic poet/historian Snorri Sturluson, which takes us back to the Danish invasions of England at the start of the last millennium. In 1014 the Danes, under Cnut, had taken London, and the English forces let by Aethelred the Unready were trying to expel them, but the Danes had fortresses in Southwark and close to what is now Tower Hill, and had also fortified the bridge, so the attacking army could not get up river.
Olaf was allied with Aethelred and he had his boats covered with thick wicker roofs to protect them from the arrows and the rocks the bridge defenders were throwing down, and these boats were rowed up to the piles supporting the bridge and chains or ropes were tied around these piles. The boats were then rowed back downstream causing the bridge supports to fail and the bridge and its defenders to fall into the Thames. The attacking army was able to take Southwark and the Danes in the city then surrendered to Aethelred. (Olaf’s name continues in London through various City churches and in ‘Tooley Street’ a corruption of ‘St Olaf’s Street’.)
In his telling of the tale Sturluson quotes a Skandic poet called Ottar the Black, and this was translated by William Laing in the 1840s as:
London Bridge is broken down
Gold is won, and bright renown
Shield resounding
War horns sounding
Proof positive! This must be the source for the nursery rhyme surely?
The problem is (and discounting the fact that Sturluson wrote his epic some 200 years after the events he describes, which may not actually have happened) that the translation plays pretty fast and loose with the original text, the word order and the scansion being heavily manipulated to fit the metre of the nursery rhyme; Ottar the Black is not the origin of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’.
(A closer translation is apparently: And further, O prover of the serpent of Ygg’s storms, valiant in war, you broke down London’s bridge. It was granted you to win lands. Iron ring-swords, swung fiercely in the war-meeting, had their course, while old shields sprang asunder. Best of luck in getting a class of five year olds to sing that.)
There may not be a meaning behind the verse, and there’s a pretty good chance that the song was not originally about London Bridge at all. There are rhymes expressing similar thoughts that are known across Europe, “Die Magdeburger Brück” from Germany, “Pont chus” from 16th-century France, and “Podul de piatra” from Romania to give some examples. Which came first, and whether there is a common root for them all, it seems impossible to know.
Leave a Reply