London Bridge: A Song History

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"London Bridge Is Falling Down" is an anonymous English rhyme and singing game, listed as number 502 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1] Its earliest known English text appears in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, dated to about 1744.[1][2] Only one copy of that tiny book is known to survive, and it is held by the British Library.[3] The song appears again, as the "celebrated song" of a broken-down London Bridge, in Joseph Ritson's Gammer Gurton's Garland, an undated Stockton chapbook that nineteenth-century bibliographers placed in 1783 or around 1784.[4] Collectors have since found it across Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, Canada and New Zealand.[1]

Painting of Old London Bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral seen through the arches of a grand loggia

Antonio Joli, Capriccio with St. Paul's and Old London Bridge, oil on canvas, ca. 1745. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An imagined view that includes the old bridge; it has no connection to the rhyme.

In the usual game, two children join raised hands to form an arch, and the rest file underneath while everyone sings.[2] At the end of a verse the arch drops to catch a player, who then joins one of the two sides, and play often ends in a tug of war.[2] Related bridge games are known in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Hungary, and in Scotland the game has been called "Broken Bridge."[2] In America the song also belonged to the play-party tradition.[1]

What the rhyme originally referred to is uncertain.[5] The London Museum notes that a bridge has stood near the site for almost two thousand years, and that it was destroyed and rebuilt many times, so any one of several disasters could lie behind the song.[5] A popular theory ties it to an attack on the bridge by Olaf of Norway, which sources date to 1014 or to 1008.[1][2] The Ballad Index doubts this link, partly because the main account is a saga written about two centuries later and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not mention the episode.[1] Writing in London Archaeologist, Jan Ragnar Hagland and Bruce Watson cite recent linguistic work rejecting the idea that the rhyme preserves a folk memory of the raid.[6] A darker legend holds that a person was buried in a bridge's foundations to make it strong, and Iona and Peter Opie noted old claims of bridges consecrated with blood.[1][2] The stone bridge opened in 1831 was later sold and now serves as a crossing at Lake Havasu in the United States, and the London Museum dismisses the story that its buyer thought he was getting Tower Bridge.[5]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "London Bridge Is Falling Down".
  2. SAGE, Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society: "London Bridge".
  3. MyLearning: "Page from Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, c.1744".
  4. Project Gutenberg: "Gammer Gurton's Garland; Or, The Nursery Parnassus".
  5. London Museum: "London Bridge Is Falling Down" (Rhymes in Time).
  6. Medievalists.net: "Fact or folklore: the Viking attack on London Bridge" (Hagland & Watson, London Archaeologist).