Woman on a horse
Statue of the “fine lady” at Banbury Cross, in Banbury, Oxfordshire
Wikimedia Commons

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]

References

  1. pp. 76–77
  2. p. 235
  3. p. 437

Bibliography

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.