ABSTRACT
The huge diversity of the nursery rhyme corpus includes verses suited to every practical purpose as well as songs to take the imagination soaring. A large number of nursery rhymes have not been found recorded before the nineteenth century, when folklore of every kind began to be taken seriously and investigated, but haphazard references from the Middle Ages onwards confirm the existence of some of them. When children go to school they encounter a quite different oral tradition. It might be said that while nursery rhymes echo the voice of the adult, being adult approved and adult transmitted, school rhymes echo the voice of children out on their own in a potentially unfriendly world. Like other oral traditions, nursery rhymes have also been disseminated in print. Mothers and grandmothers purvey nursery rhymes; and it is the girls who cherish and pass on the singing games and the multitude of rhymes used in the skipping, ball-bouncing and clapping games.
