“Jack Be Nimble” is a nursery rhyme first recorded in a manuscript of about 1815, and first published by James Orchard Halliwell in his The Nursery Rhymes of England (1844).[1]
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candle stick.
Jumping candlesticks was a form of fortune telling that survived until the early 20th century. Good luck was said to be signalled by clearing a candle without extinguishing the flame.[1] The folklorist Mary Baker records that on the evening of St Catherine’s Day,[a]St Catherine’s Day is 25 November. St Catherine is probably a fictional martyr, but who nevertheless became the patron saint of lace-makers, spinners, rope-makers, wheelwrights, carpenters, young women, and female students.[2] in Wendover in Buckinghamshire, the girls “drew up their skirts and played the old game of leap-candle, jumping back and forth for luck over a lighted lace-maker’s candle set upon the floor”.[3]
Notes
| a | St Catherine’s Day is 25 November. St Catherine is probably a fictional martyr, but who nevertheless became the patron saint of lace-makers, spinners, rope-makers, wheelwrights, carpenters, young women, and female students.[2] |
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