Cockle bread was an inferior type of British corn or wheat bread mixed with "
cockle weed". In the 17th century a practice known as "moulding" cockle-bread had a sexual connotation. Cockle bread is also mentioned in a 19th-century nursery rhyme.
Cockle weed bread
The play ''
The Old Wives' Tale
''The Old Wives' Tale'' is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's sho ...
'' by
George Peele
George Peele (baptised 25 July 1556 – buried 9 November 1596) was an English translator, poet, and dramatist, who is most noted for his supposed but not universally accepted collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play ''Titus Andronicus' ...
, first published in 1595, has a reference to "cockle-bread". The editor of a 20th-century edition of the play, Charles Whitworth, points to the "
cockle" as a weed found in corn and wheat fields, and suggests that "cockle-bread" was possibly an inferior bread, made from those grains, with the weed mixed into it.
William Carew Hazlitt
William Carew Hazlitt (22 August 18348 September 1913), known professionally as W. Carew Hazlitt, was an English lawyer, bibliographer, editor and writer. He was the son of the barrister and registrar William Hazlitt, a grandson of the essayist a ...
writing in ''Faith and Folklore: a dictionary'' in 1905, gives the same explanation of "Cockle Bread" as Whitworth.
The "moulding" of cocklebread
In the 17th century a sexual connotation is attached not to the bread itself but to "a dance that involved revealing the buttocks and simulating sexual activity" which was known as "moulding" cockle bread.
John Aubrey
John Aubrey (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697) was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the ''Brief Lives'', his collection of short biographical pieces. He was a pioneer archaeologist, ...
writes of "young wenches" indulging in a "wanton sport" called "moulding of Cocklebread" where they would "get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather-up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading of Dough with their Arses".
While doing this, the young women would sing the rhyme:
Aubrey compares this, writing "I did imagine nothing to have been in this but mere wantonness of youth ... but I find in Buchardus's book Methodus Confitendi ... one of the articles of interrogating a young woman is, if she did ever subjugere panem clunibus, and then bake it, and give it to the one she loved to eat".
From this he decides "I find it to be a relic of natural magic, an unlawful philtrum" (i.e. aphrodisiac or love charm).
Writing in ''A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature'', Gordon Williams sees Aubrey's "wanton sport" in a 1641 mention of moulding cocklebread, a "sexual sense" in a prayer mentioning the practice from 1683, and considers it "transparent" in the 1683 ''Fifteen Real Conforts Of Matrimony'' which "tells how 'Mrs. Betty has been Moulding of Cockle-bread, and her mother discovers it'; the consequence is a 'By-blow in her belly'".
Nursery rhyme
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Cockle-Bread became the name of a children's game, played to a nursery rhyme in which the bread is mentioned:
Writing in ''Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain'' in 1854,
John Brand describes the nursery rhyme as "modern", but adds that its connection to the earlier "moulding" of cockle bread "is by no means generally understood".
See also
*
Cordax
The cordax ( grc, κόρδαξ), was a provocative, licentious, and often obscene mask dance of ancient Greek comedy. In his play ''The Clouds'', Aristophanes complains that other playwrights of his time try to hide the feebleness of their plays b ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cockle Bread
Sexual attraction
British breads
Magic substances
Buttocks