The nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" is published - October 12th, 1609

On this day in 1609, the original version of the popular children’s nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice” was published for the first time in London.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio, Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that gives a quick look it's something that
happened a long time ago. Today I'm Gabelusier, and in

(00:22):
this episode we're doing a deep dive into the origin
of the Three Stooges theme song, better known to traumatize
kids the world over as three Blind Mice. The day

(00:43):
was October twelfth, sixteen o nine. The original version of
the popular children's nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice was published
for the first time in London. It appeared in a
work called Douteromelia Uh, a collection of British folk music,
including rounds, catches, street cries, vendor songs, and other forms

(01:08):
of anonymous music that could be heard on the streets
of seventeenth century London. The collection was compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft,
a musician, composer and editor who sought to record and
preserve the oral traditions of his countrymen. It's unclear who
wrote Three Blind Mice or when they wrote it, but

(01:31):
it was well known enough by sixteen o nine for
ravens Croft too include it in his collection However, the
version he transcribed was not the one we're familiar with today.
The words of the original read as follows, three blind mice,
three blind mice, Dame Julian, Dame Julian, the miller and

(01:53):
his merry old wife, she scraped her tripe, lick thou
the knife. Three blind mice, three blind mice. If the
meaning of that rhyme is a little unclear to you,
you're not alone. The name Dame Julian seems to be
a reference to Julian of Norwich, a fourteen century author

(02:16):
who is best known for her book Revelations of Divine Love,
but why she would be included in the rhyme is
anybody's guess. As for the line she scraped her tripe
lick thou the knife, the meaning is roughly that the
miller's wife has scraped her belly with a knife, and

(02:37):
now someone maybe her husband, is expected to lick the
knife clean, which is pretty gross. It's possible the song
is some kind of reference to the religious beliefs of
Julian of Norwich, and that she, the miller, and his
wife are themselves the three blind mice. But the cultural

(02:57):
context that would explain such an interpret Paitian seems to
be missing. The current version of the rhyme didn't enter
the canon of children's literature until over two hundred years later,
in eight forty two, when it was published in a
collection called the Nursery Rhymes of England. You're probably familiar

(03:17):
with this version, but just in case it's been a while.
It goes like this, Three blind mice, Three blind mice.
See how they run? See how they run? They all
ran after the farmer's wife, who cut off their tails
with a carving knife. Did you ever see such a
sight in your life? As three blind mice? Now, that

(03:40):
version makes a whole lot more sense than the original,
but we're talking about nursery rhymes, so perhaps trying to
make exact sense of it is a fool's Errand anyway, however,
many people have speculated that there's a dark, hidden meaning
to both versions of the song. The theory goes that
the miller his wife or the farmer's wife is a

(04:02):
veiled reference to Queen Mary the First, a notoriously cruel
Catholic ruler also known as Bloody Mary. It's been speculated
that the three blind mice in the song are stand
ins for three Protestant bishops known as the Oxford Martyrs.
In fifteen fifty five, Mary had the three bishops tried

(04:25):
for heresy and eventually executed for refusing to reject their
Protestant faith. The men weren't maimed or blinded, however, but
burned at the stake. Still, that doesn't rule out the interpretation,
as from a Catholic perspective, the bishops could be considered
blinded by their Protestant beliefs. The larger issue with this

(04:49):
reading of the song is that the execution of the
Oxford Martyrs occurred more than half a century before it
was first recorded. It's possible that Mary's merciless rain and
her punishment of the bishops left a lasting impression on
her British subjects, so much so that they were still
singing about it over fifty years later. After all, the

(05:12):
nursery rhyme Mary Mary, quite contrary, was also supposedly written
about that brutal ruler. But it's equally as likely, if
not more so, that three Blind Mice is just some
amusing nonsense about an exasperated woman terrorizing some sightless rodents,

(05:33):
you know, for kids. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you
now know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you're so inclined, you can keep up
with the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at t
d I HC Show. And if you have any nursery

(05:53):
rhyme theories of your own to share, you can send
them my way at this Day at i heart media
dot com. Thanks as always the Channeler Mays for producing
the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
back here again tomorrow for another Day in History class.

(06:17):
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