London Bridge Is Falling Down

The story

"London Bridge Is Falling Down", also known as "My Fair Lady" or "London Bridge", is a traditional English nursery rhyme and singing game about the decay of London Bridge and the attempts, real or fanciful, to rebuild it. Similar rhymes are older elsewhere in Europe: "Knippelsbro Går Op og Ned" in Denmark, "Die Magdeburger Brück" in Germany, "Pont chus" in 16th-century France and "Le porte" in 14th-century Italy, and the English rhyme may have been taken from one of them and fitted to England's most famous bridge. One of the earliest English references is in the comedy The London Chaunticleres, printed in 1657 but probably written about 1636, where the dairywoman Curds remembers having "danced the building of London-Bridge" at the Whitsun Ales in her youth. Henry Carey used it in his satire Namby Pamby (1725), which suggests that it was widely known.

The earliest printed English version is in the oldest surviving collection of nursery rhymes, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, printed by John Newbery in London about 1744. The words were then close to their modern form, and the rhyme became popular in the 19th century, above all in Britain and the United States. Its verses are short four-line stanzas in a falling rhythm that rely on repetition rather than rhyme, and the bridge is built up in turn of different materials, few of which hold. Its music changed several times: John Playford's The Dancing Master printed a "London Bridge" tune in 1718, without words, the rhyme was sung to "Nancy Dawson" in 1821, and the tune now sung was first recorded in 1879 in the United States, in A. H. Rosewig's Illustrated National Songs and Games.

It is a game as much as a song. Most often two players join hands to make an arch, the others pass beneath in a line, and the arch is lowered at the end of the song to catch one of them; in the United States those caught often form two teams for a tug of war. Arch games were common across late medieval Europe, and in England until the 19th century the song may have gone with a circle dance. Five of the nine versions Alice Gomme published in 1894 mention a prisoner who has stolen a watch and chain, perhaps taken from another game sung to the same tune.

Its meaning is uncertain. It may simply reflect how hard it was to bridge the River Thames: until the mid-18th century the Old London Bridge was the only crossing in London, its 19 narrow arches hampered the river, and it needed constant and costly repairs until a new bridge opened in 1831. That bridge was in turn replaced in 1972 and rebuilt at Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Other explanations link the rhyme to an attack on London Bridge by Olaf II in 1014 (or 1009), though the saga verse once quoted for this was a free translation by Samuel Laing, modelled on the nursery rhyme itself; Alice Gomme suggested that it recalled the burial of a human sacrifice in the bridge's foundations, an idea later discussed by Iona and Peter Opie. The "fair lady" of the refrain has been identified with the Virgin Mary, with Matilda of Scotland, who built bridges over the River Lea, with Eleanor of Provence, who held the bridge's revenues, with the Leigh family of Stoneleigh, and with the River Lea itself. By the late 19th century it was one of the best-known rhymes in the English-speaking world; T. S. Eliot used it at the climax of The Waste Land (1922).

What it says

The rhyme tells of London Bridge falling down and of the ways the singers propose to build it up again, each material failing in turn, while the refrain calls on a "fair lady". In the game the song ends with the arch coming down. The mood is playful, with a hint of mystery about the bridge and the lady.

The words