The 15 Oldest Nursery Rhymes

We went looking for the oldest nursery rhymes still sung today, counting only those with a reliable date of first publication or documented use. Most of our finds came from England, but the very oldest is a French classic that children have been singing for some six hundred years.

How We Dated the Rhymes

Nursery rhymes are notoriously hard to date. Most circulated by word of mouth for years, sometimes generations, before anyone bothered to write them down, so the year a rhyme was first sung is almost always older than the year it first appeared in print. For this list we used the most reliable marker we could find for each rhyme: a documented first publication, a dated manuscript, or a clear reference in another contemporary text. That means the dates above mark when each rhyme can first be proven to have existed, not necessarily when it was born.

By that measure the oldest entry is the French round "Sur le Pont d'Avignon", with roots reaching back to the 1400s. The rest of the top of the list is dominated by England, from "Foxy's Hole" in the 1500s to "Ding Dong Bell", which was recorded by an organist named John Lant in 1580.

From Spoken Word to Printed Page

As printing spread through the 17th and 18th centuries, rhymes that had only ever been spoken began to be collected and sold. "Three Blind Mice" appeared in a 1609 music book called Deuteromelia, and "Frog Went A-Courting" turns up in print around 1611. The real turning point came in the mid-1700s with Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (around 1744), generally regarded as the earliest surviving collection assembled specifically for children. Once rhymes were fixed on the page, their wording started to settle into the versions we recognise today.

Why So Many of These Are English

The lopsided geography of this list says as much about record-keeping as it does about where rhymes were invented. England developed an early commercial printing trade and a habit of compiling songbooks, ballads and chapbooks, so English rhymes left a paper trail that survives. Plenty of rhymes from other countries are surely just as old, but without an early dated source they're impossible to rank. A handful here still cross borders. "The More We Get Together" shares its tune with the German "Ach, du lieber Augustin", a reminder that these songs rarely belonged to one country alone.

Old Rhymes, Hidden Meanings

Part of the appeal of these old verses is how much darker they often are than they first sound. Some carry folk superstition, some satirise public figures, and many of the "secret meanings" attached to them are themselves later inventions. "Ring a Ring o' Roses" is popularly tied to the Great Plague, with the "ring" read as a rash and the "posies" as flowers carried against the smell of death. Yet folklorists point out the rhyme isn't recorded until well after the plague, so the link is likely a 20th-century story rather than history.

Others have a traceable origin. "Mary Had a Little Lamb", too recent for this list but a useful example, really was written about a real girl, Mary Sawyer, whose pet lamb followed her to school in 1810s Massachusetts. Knowing the backstory doesn't spoil these rhymes; it shows how each one is a small fossil of the time and place that made it.

More Old and Old-Fashioned Nursery Rhymes

If these old-fashioned nursery rhymes have you curious, there is plenty more to dig into. Many of the oldest English nursery rhymes carry stranger histories and darker roots than their sing-song tunes let on. Here is where to go next:

• Nursery Rhymes Through History: the full timeline, with every dated rhyme on the site sorted century by century.
• The History of Nursery Rhymes: a century-by-century look at how these verses grew from spoken word to printed page.
• The Dark Origins of Nursery Rhymes: the plague, executions, and scandals hiding behind familiar old rhymes.
• How Nursery Rhymes Evolved: why the words we sing today drifted so far from the originals.
• Monday's Child: one of the best-loved old fortune-telling rhymes, decoded day by day.