There are several English nursery rhymes beginning with the line “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross”. Probably the best known today is:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine lady upon a white horse; Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, And she shall have music wherever she goes.[1]
The earliest surviving version of the rhyme, published in Gammer Gurton’s Garland or The Nursery Parnassus, (1784), replaces the “fine lady” with an “old lady”; a 1790 version has her with “a ring on her finger, A bonnet of straw”. The “fine lady” has been popularly identified with Queen Elizabeth I and Lady Godiva.[1]
The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie have pointed to the difficulty of determining the age of the nursery rhyme, but the “bells on her toes” may suggest a 15th-century origin, when bells were worn on the long tapering end of each shoe. Certainly, the cross at Banbury was reported as having been destroyed by Puritans in a “furious zeal” some time around 1600.[1] The present-day cross in the centre of Banbury, designed by the architect John Gibbs, was erected in 1859.[2][3]
Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1997.
Pevsner, Nikolaus, and Jennifer Sherwood. Oxfordshire. Penguin Books, 1974.
Tyack, Geoffrey. Oxford: An Architectural Guide. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimise our website and our service. By clicking on “All cookies”, you consent to us using all cookies and plug-ins as described in our Cookie policy.
Functional cookies
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.