ABSTRACT
There are several towns called St Ives in England. This traditional nursery rhyme and riddle is most probably based on the market town in Cambridgeshire. Despite appearances, only the narrator is going to St Ives, although he meets a man who is coming away with what seems like enormous wealth. But there is a cryptic message in this tale. ‘Never buy a pig in a poke’ is an old saying, ‘poke’ being a sack. That is, always check thoroughly what you think you have paid for. Unscrupulous traders would put a cat into a sack and pass it off as a piglet, so the buyer thinks he has bought an investment for his family until he opens it up and ‘lets the cat out of the bag’.
