"Who Killed Cock Robin" is an English-origin

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be ca ...

and

nursery rhyme A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. Fr ...

. It has a

Roud Folk Song Index The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadsid ...

number of 494.

Lyrics

The earliest record of the rhyme is in ''

Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book ''Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book'' is the oldest extant anthology of English nursery rhymes, published in London in 1744. It contains the oldest printed texts of many well-known and popular rhymes, as well as several that eventually dropped out o ...

'', published in 1744, which noted only the first four verses. The extended version given below was not printed until c. 1770.I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 130–3. :Who killed Cock

Robin Robin most commonly refers to several species of passerine birds. Robin may also refer to: Animals * Australasian robins, red-breasted songbirds of the family Petroicidae * Many members of the subfamily Saxicolinae (Old World chats), inclu ...

? :I, said the Sparrow, :with my bow and arrow, :I killed Cock Robin. : :Who saw him die? :I, said the

Fly Flies are insects of the order Diptera, the name being derived from the Greek δι- ''di-'' "two", and πτερόν ''pteron'' "wing". Insects of this order use only a single pair of wings to fly, the hindwings having evolved into advanced ...

, :with my little teeny eye, :I saw him die. : :Who caught his blood? :I, said the

Fish A fish (: fish or fishes) is an aquatic animal, aquatic, Anamniotes, anamniotic, gill-bearing vertebrate animal with swimming fish fin, fins and craniate, a hard skull, but lacking limb (anatomy), limbs with digit (anatomy), digits. Fish can ...

, :With my little dish :I caught his blood. : :Who'll make the shroud? :I, said the

Beetle Beetles are insects that form the Taxonomic rank, order Coleoptera (), in the superorder Holometabola. Their front pair of wings are hardened into wing-cases, elytra, distinguishing them from most other insects. The Coleoptera, with about 40 ...

, :with my thread and needle, :I'll make the shroud. : :Who'll dig his grave? :I, said the

Owl Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes (), which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers a ...

, :with my pick and trowel, :I'll dig his grave. : :Who'll be the parson? :I, said the

Rook Rook or rooks may refer to: Games *Rook (chess), a piece in chess that moves horizontally and vertically * Rook (card game), a trick-taking card game People, characters, individuals *a rookie, a rook * Russell Rook, Baron Rook (The Lord Rook; 21 ...

, :with my little book, :I'll be the parson. : :Who'll be the clerk? :I, said the

Lark Larks are passerine birds of the family Alaudidae. Larks have a cosmopolitan distribution with the largest number of species occurring in Africa. Only a single species, the horned lark, occurs in North America, and only Horsfield's bush lark occ ...

, :if it's not in the dark, :I'll be the clerk. : :Who'll carry the link? :I, said the

Linnet The common linnet (''Linaria cannabina'') is a small passerine bird of the finch family, Fringillidae. It derives its common name and the scientific name, ''Linaria'', from its fondness for hemp seeds and flax seeds—flax being the English na ...

, :I'll fetch it in a minute, :I'll carry the link. : :Who'll be chief mourner? :I, said the

Dove Columbidae is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with small heads, relatively short necks and slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. ...

, :I mourn for my love, :I'll be chief mourner. : :Who'll carry the coffin? :I, said the

Kite A kite is a tethered heavier than air flight, heavier-than-air craft with wing surfaces that react against the air to create Lift (force), lift and Drag (physics), drag forces. A kite consists of wings, tethers and anchors. Kites often have ...

, :if it's not through the night, :I'll carry the coffin. : :Who'll bear the pall? :We, said the

Wren Wrens are a family, Troglodytidae, of small brown passerine birds. The family includes 96 species and is divided into 19 genera. All species are restricted to the New World except for the Eurasian wren that is widely distributed in the Old Worl ...

, :both the cock and the hen, :We’ll bear the pall. : :Who'll sing a psalm? :I, said the

Thrush Thrush may refer to: Birds * Thrush (bird), any of the birds in the family Turdidae ** List of thrush species * Antthrushes, the Formicariidae family of birds * Dohrn's warbler, or Dohrn's thrush-babbler, a species ''Sylvia dohrni'' in the famil ...

, :as she sat on a bush, :I'll sing a psalm. : :Who'll toll the bell? :I, said the

Bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

, :because I can pull, :I'll toll the bell. : :All the birds of the air :fell a-sighing and a-sobbing, :when they heard the bell toll :for poor Cock Robin. The rhyme also has an alternative ending, in which the sparrow who killed Cock Robin is hanged for his crime. Several early versions picture a stocky, strong-billed

bullfinch Bullfinch is a name given to two groups of passerine birds. True bullfinches The true bullfinches are thick-billed finches in the passerine family Fringillidae. They comprise the genus '' Pyrrhula''. These birds are distributed across Asia and Eu ...

tolling the bell, which may have been the original intention of the rhyme.

Origin and meaning

Although the earliest known record of the song is from the mid-eighteenth century, there is some evidence that it is much older. The death of a robin by an arrow is depicted in a 15th-century

stained glass Stained glass refers to coloured glass as a material or art and architectural works created from it. Although it is traditionally made in flat panels and used as windows, the creations of modern stained glass artists also include three-dimensio ...

window at Buckland Rectory, Gloucestershire. A similar fragmentary rhyme appears in the collected grammatical miscellany of 15th-century schoolmaster, Thomas Schort, which reads: :Y say a sparw :Schotte an arow :By an harow :Into a barow The rhyme is also similar to a poem, ''Phyllyp Sparowe'', written by John Skelton about 1508, in which the narrator laments the death of his pet bird. The use of the rhyme 'owl' with 'shovel' could suggest that it was originally used in older middle English pronunciation. Versions of the story appear to exist in other countries, including Germany. A number of theories have been advanced to explain the meaning of the rhyme: * The rhyme records a mythological event, such as the death of the god

Balder Baldr (Old Norse also Balder, Baldur) is a god in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, he is a son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg, and has numerous brothers, such as Thor and Váli. In wider Germanic mythology, the god was known in ...

from

Norse mythology Norse, Nordic, or Scandinavian mythology, is the body of myths belonging to the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Old Norse religion and continuing after the Christianization of Scandinavia as the Nordic folklore of the modern period. The ...

, or the ritual sacrifice of a king figure, as proposed by early folklorists as in the '

Cutty Wren "The Cutty Wren" and its variants such as "The Hunting of the Wren" are traditional English folk songs. The origins and meaning of the song are disputed. It is number 236 in the Roud Folk Song Index. Origin The song is thought by some to repre ...

' theory of a 'pagan survival'. * It is a parody of the death of King William II, who was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest (Hampshire) in 1100, and who was known as William Rufus, meaning "red".J. Harrowven, ''The origins of rhymes, songs and sayings'' (Kaye & Ward, 1977), p. 92. * The rhyme is connected with the fall of

Robert Walpole Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford (; 26 August 1676 – 18 March 1745), known between 1725 and 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British Whigs (British political party), Whig statesman who is generally regarded as the ''de facto'' first Prim ...

's government in 1742, since Robin is a diminutive form of Robert and the first printing is close to the time of the events mentioned. All of these theories are based on perceived similarities in the text to legendary or historical events, or on the similarities of names.

Peter Opie Iona Margaret Balfour Opie, (13 October 1923 – 23 October 2017) and Peter Mason Opie (25 November 1918 – 5 February 1982) were an English married team of folklorists who applied modern techniques to understanding children's literature and p ...

pointed out that an existing rhyme could have been adapted to fit the circumstances of political events in the eighteenth century. The theme of Cock Robin's death as well as the poem's distinctive cadence have become archetypes, much used in literary fiction and other works of art, from poems, to murder mysteries, to cartoons.

Notes

External links

*
Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin
', by H. L. Stephens, from

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

*
Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin
' From the Collections at the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

{{authority control Robert Walpole 1744 songs Fictional passerine birds English nursery rhymes Songs with unknown songwriters English folk songs English children's songs Traditional children's songs Songs about birds Songs about death Murder ballads