10 Sinister Nursery Rhymes With Meanings You Won’t Believe

Pop Goes the Weasel

A penny for a spool of thread,

A penny for a needle.

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop! goes the weasel.

Every night when I go out

The monkey’s on the table

Take a stick and knock it off

Pop goes the weasel.

It seems like someone is buying needle and thread and the weasel is a slang word for money. But Pop Goes the Weasel is likely about selling off your stuff at a pawn shop to have money for other indulgences. ‘Pop’ was a slang word for pawn and there are references to a tailor’s tools (‘spool of thread’ and ‘needle’) which implies that a tailor pawned their stuff to get money for other things. ‘Monkey’ was slang for £500, meaning the money received from the pawn shop was spent out drinking at the pub.

Old Mother Hubbard

Old Mother Hubbard

Went to the cupboard

To get her poor doggie a bone,

When she got there

The cupboard was bare

So the poor little doggie had none.

This nursery rhyme brings to mind a little old lady who lives in a cottage with her dog but, nothing could be further from the truth. Old Mother Hubbard is not old and not a woman. Old Mother Hubbard is believed to be about Cardinal Wosley, who was close to King Henry VIII and a liaison between the pope and the king, who was seeking the pope’s acceptance for his divorce from Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The pope did not grant the divorce and this made the king very upset with the Cardinal. ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ was, in fact, Cardinal Wosley and the ‘cupboard’ was the Catholic Church. The ‘doogie’ was King Henry and the ‘bone’ was a divorce.