Ring-a-ring-a roses.
A pocket full of posies.
Atishoo, atishoo. We all fall down.
Folklorists say that this children’s nursery rhyme originated when the Great Plague ravaged London in the mid 17th century. With symptoms of red rings on the skin, people clutching flowers to fend off the disease (remember, this was the old days) and bouts of sneezing followed by death, this ditty describes the course of the terrible disease fairly well. We’re talking about the bubonic plague, whose European roots go all the way back to the Black Death of the 14th century, if not before.
By the 14th century, trade routes covered much of the world. Ships and caravans carried goods from one country to the next, such as wine, wood and cotton. Oh, and the bubonic plague, too. Historians believe that the Black Death traveled eastbound from China in silk cargo infested with plague-carrying fleas and rats. It eventually gripped the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy and England, wiping out almost half of the population of Europe—around 75 million people—in the 1300s.
But the European horror didn’t end there. In the 1600s, the bubonic plague struck again, fiercely in the Netherlands before spreading to Germany, then England. In 1634, the locals of Oberammergau in Germany vowed to perform the “Play of the Suffering, Dying and Resurrection of Christ,” known as the Passion Play, every ten years if they were spared. When the death rate fell from 20% in 1633 to 1% by 1634, it seemed God did listen to their plea. That must explain why the tradition of the lengthy seven-hour Oberammergau Passion Play has endured, staged every ten years since then. It’s so popular that in 2010, 102 performances drew packed audiences from all over the world.
Another outbreak of the bubonic plague hit England in the 1665. London suffered the most, losing 20% of its population in a year—becoming known as The Great Plague of London. The poor suffered the most because most noblemen fled the area. Even King Charles II left his palace and headed for Oxford. Locals did everything they could to contain the disease. They set fire to belongings, burned incense and smoked cigarettes thinking that the fumes would drive away illness. They even culled cats and dogs, blaming these animals for spreading the plague. (Bad decision on hindsight. As any Tom and Jerry fan knows—cats love to eat rodents, even the bubonic-carrying kind.)
The Great Plague finally died out in 1666 thanks to The Great Fire of London when a bakery on London’s Pudding Lane caught fire. The fire spread so far it wrecked the whole medieval portion of the City of London, thousands of homes and even St. Paul’s Cathedral. And King Charles escaped again. The fire stopped just short of Westminster, the aristocratic part of London where he kept his palace. (What royal luck.)
Like, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London’s devastation is immortalized in the Nursery Rhyme Hall of Fame. British children still sing about the Great Fire in the popular nursery rhyme London’s Burning:
London’s burning, London’s burning
Fetch the engines, fetch the engines
Fire fire, fire fire
Pour on water, pour on water!
Now you know that those children’s tunes are not so sweet and innocent after all.