Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox song "Little Boy Blue" is an English-language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 11318.
LyricsEdit
A common version of the rhyme is:
<poem>
Little Boy Blue, Come blow your horn. The sheep's in the meadow, The cow's in the corn. Where is the boy Who looks after the sheep? He's under the haystack, Fast asleep. Will you wake him? No, not I, For if I do,
He's sure to cry.</poem>
Origins and meaningEdit
The earliest printed version of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb's Little Song Book (c. 1744), but the rhyme may be much older. It may be alluded to in Shakespeare's King Lear (III, vi)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> when Edgar, masquerading as Mad Tom, says:
<poem>Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepheard?
- Thy sheepe be in the corne;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth
- Thy sheepe shall take no harme.<ref name=Opie1997>I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 98–9.</ref></poem>
It has been arguedTemplate:By whom that Little Boy Blue was intended to represent Cardinal Wolsey, who was the son of an Ipswich butcher, who may have acted as a hayward to his father's livestock, but there is no corroborative evidence to support this assertion.<ref name=Opie1997/> A more plausible, simpler suggestion, avoiding any reference to Wolsey, is made by George Homans in his book English Villagers of the 13th Century, who writes, after quoting Piers PlowmanTemplate:'s description of the hayward and his horn: "The hayward's horn, his badge of office, must have been used to give warning that cattle or other trespassers were in the corn. Little Boy Blue was a hayward."<ref name=":0">George C Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 2nd printing, 1942 p 294</ref>