Little Bo-Peep
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"Little Bo-Peep" or "Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 6487.
Words and melody
As with most products of oral tradition, there are many variations to the rhyme. One modern version of the first verse is:<ref name=LittleBoPeepRhyme>Template:Cite web</ref> Template:Poemquote
Variants of the second line include "And can't tell where to find them", with the fourth line sometimes being given as "And bring their tails behind them".<ref name="Opie1997" />
The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded in 1870 by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs.<ref>J. J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (Courier Dover Publications, 5th edn., 2000), Template:ISBN, p. 502.</ref>
Additional verses
The rhyme continues:<ref name=Opie1997/> Template:Poemquote
This is an allusion of the common practice of docking lambs' tails.
Origins and history
The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805, which contains only the first verse which references the adult Bo Peep , called 'Little' because she was short and not because she was young.<ref name=Opie1997/> There are references to a children's game called "bo-peep", from the 16th century, including one in Shakespeare's King Lear (Act I Scene iv), for which "Template:Linktext" is thought to refer to the children's game of peek-a-boo,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> but there's no evidence that the rhyme existed earlier than the 18th century.<ref name=Opie1997/> The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in 1810, published in London by Joseph Johnson.<ref name=Opie1997>I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pages 107–108.</ref>
The phrase "to play bo peep" was in use from the 14th century to refer to the punishment of being stood in a pillory. For example, in 1364, an ale-wife, Alice Causton, was convicted of giving short measure, for which crime she had to "play bo peep thorowe a pillery".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Andrew Boorde uses the same phrase in 1542, "Template:Lang".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Nevertheless, connections with sheep are early; a fifteenth-century ballad includes the lines: "Template:Lang // In every corner they play boe-peep".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>