Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
After an afternoon at the Borough Markets, we returned home on the top deck of a double decker London bus. We hopped off a stop past "The Eagle".
In the interests of maintaining an antipodean knowledge of our English heritage, particularly of moralistic nursery rhymes and rhyming cockney slang as opposed to the monarchy, I offer the following:
There was a nursery rhyme I remember singing as a child. 'Pop Goes the Weasel' was originally a dance tune that generated its own dance steps and in time lyrics.
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That's the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out,
The monkey's on the table,
Take a stick and knock it off,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Of all the meanings attributed to the lyrics, I prefer the following:
"that's the way the money goes" involves pawning one's coat in desperation to buy food and drink, as "weasel (and stoat)" is more usually and traditionally Cockney rhyming slang for "Coat" and "pop" is a slang word for "pawn".
"Pop goes the weasel" meant pawning a coat. Decent coats and other clothes were handmade, expensive and pawnable. The monkey on the table in verse two was the demand for payment of a mortgage or other secured loan. If knocked off the table or ignored it would go unpaid and accrue interest, requiring the coat to be pawned again. The stick itself may also be rhyming slang - "Sticks and Stones: Loans".
The "Eagle" in the song's third verse refers to The Eagle freehold pub at the corner of Shepherdess Walk and City Road mentioned in the same verse. The Eagle was an old pub in City Road, London, which was rebuilt as a music hall in 1825, demolished in 1901, and then rebuilt as a public house. This public house bears a plaque with this interpretation of the nursery rhyme and the pub's history.
A spinner's weasel consists of a wheel which is revolved by the spinner in order to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet, so that 40 revolutions produces 80 yards of yarn, which is a skein. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, telling the spinner that she has completed the skein.
I might just have to make a pint at The Eagle my goal for New Years Eve.
- comments