Little Jack Horner

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There other people named Jack Horner.

Little Jack Horner is a nursery rhyme.

Contents

1 Rhyme
2 Origins
3 Other versions
4 Reference

Rhyme

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,

Eating a Christmas pie:

He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,

And said, “What a good boy am I!”

Origins

Jack was actually Thomas Horner, steward to Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Legend has it that, prior to the Abbey's destruction during the Dissolution of the monasteries commanded by Henry VIII, the Abbot tried to avoid the event by sending Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie that had the deeds of a dozen manors hidden in it. During the journey Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the Manor of Mells in Somerset. While records do record that Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, both his descendants and subsequent owners of Mells Manor have claimed that the legend is somewhat libellous.

A 16th-century rhyme noted

"Hopton, Horner, Smyth and Thynne:

When Abbotts went out, they came in."

The first publication date for "Little Jack Horner" is 1725, but all the common English nursery rhymes were long in circulation before they appeared in print.

Bob Dylan referred to the rhyme in a lyric, "Little Jack Horner's got nothing on me," from the song Country Pie, off of his album, Nashville Skyline.

Other versions

In the European Union, a new version of nursery rhyme has developed thus:

Little Jack Horner MEP

Sat in the corner of his SUV

Claiming his Christmas travel expenses.

He pulled out his pen,

and scribbled in ten

thousand euros for a single first class trip to Strasbourg, tax free for us, the tax-payers, to foot the bill of -

we must be out of our senses!

Another version was printed in the Beano in a joke on nursery rhymes

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a corner

Eating a huge Christmas pie

He should have checked the sell-by date

After all, it was mid-July

This version ends with "little Jack Horner" becoming quite ill.

Another version is as follows:

Little Jack Horner

Sat in the corner

Watching the girls go by.

Along came a beauty and he said, "hi cutie!"

And that's how he got his black eye!

American comedian George Carlin offered this drug-related alternative (along with a version of Old King Cole that suggested that the King's pipe and bowl refer to marijuana):

Little Jack Horner

Sat in the corner

Eating his Christmas pie.

He stuck in his thumb,

And pulled out a plum,

And he said, "Holy shit, am I high!"

There is yet another version, usually read by police to young offenders.

Little Jack Horner

Sat in my corner

Eating my Christmas pie

He stuck in his thumb

And pulled out a plum

And said "What a bad boy am I!"

Reference

William Stuart Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained, New York: Bramhall House Publishing, 1962

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