Goosey Goosey Gander
Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady’s chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn’t say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.
Where the rhyme comes from
The earliest recorded version of Goosey Goosey Gander is in Gammer Gurton’s Garland, or The Nursery Parnassus, a small chapbook edited by the antiquary Joseph Ritson and published in 1784. It was one of the first printed collections to gather nursery rhymes together, and only a single copy of that first edition is known to survive, in the British Library. The rhyme had probably been passed around by word of mouth before then, but nothing earlier has been found.
What Ritson printed, though, is not quite the rhyme sung today. It runs to six lines, and there is no old man in it:
Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs and down stairs,
In my lady’s chamber;
There you’ll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger.
The prayers, the left leg and the tumble downstairs all arrived later. In their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Iona and Peter Opie record a separate little rhyme about the daddy-long-legs, or crane fly, from about 1780: “Old father Long-Legs / Can’t say his prayers: / Take him by the left leg, / And throw him downstairs.” The Opies suggest that it was joined to the goose rhyme, probably in the early nineteenth century. No exact date or collection for the join has been found. The rhyme is catalogued as number 6488 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
Even the six-line original keeps a little of its mystery. One explanation is that sack was a strong fortified wine and a “race” of ginger a root of it — though we have found that gloss in only one source, and the rhyme itself offers no explanation.
What does it mean?
The most repeated explanation is a dark one, and it deserves an honest health warning: no early evidence connects the rhyme to any of these events.
The priest-hole theory. A popular story holds that the rhyme remembers the searching of Catholic households during and after the English Reformation, when priests hid in concealed “priest holes” behind panelling and beneath floors. On this reading the gander is a search party going “upstairs and downstairs”, and the old man who “wouldn’t say his prayers” is a priest who would not recite them in English. It is widely repeated, but no early source ties the rhyme to priest holes. Worse for the theory, everything it explains — the old man, the prayers, the left leg, the fall — belongs to the lines that were missing from the 1784 text, and that began life as a separate rhyme about a crane fly. The persecutions it invokes belong to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Treat it as folklore about a rhyme rather than documented history.
Slang and soldiers. The writer Chris Roberts, in Heavy Words Lightly Thrown (2006), has suggested that “left leg” was once slang for a Catholic. It is also said online that “goosey” nods at the goose-step of Cromwell’s soldiers, but the goose step was an eighteenth-century Prussian invention, a century after Cromwell. Neither idea comes with early evidence.
The plainer reading. The rhyme as first printed is a nonsense question about a wandering bird, with a good rhyme-pair in gander and wander and a glimpse of a comfortable house. The old man is a later, abrupt addition, and children’s verse has always enjoyed a little cheerful cruelty. That is all the evidence supports, and it is quite enough for a rhyme that has lasted more than two hundred years.
Sharing it with children
This is a splendid rhyme for stairs and staircases, real or imaginary. Walk two fingers up a child’s arm for “upstairs” and back down for “downstairs”, then give a tiny tickle at “my lady’s chamber”. On a knee, bounce steadily through the first verse and tip gently sideways at the last line. Older children like waddling round the room as the gander and choosing a new place to wander to each time — in the garden, in the kitchen, in the cupboard — which turns the rhyme into a simple, endlessly repeatable game about prepositions and places.
The six-line 1784 version makes a gentler alternative for the very young: stop after “my lady’s chamber” and let the child decide what might be waiting there.
Extra verses to sing
These verses aren’t traditional — they’re ours. Sing them if you would rather the old man landed softly.
Goosey goosey gander,
Where else shall I roam?
Out through the orchard
And down the lane for home.
There I found the old man
A-sitting on the stair,
So I brought him bread and honey
And we said a little prayer.