Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark

"Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark" is an English nursery rhyme. Its origins are uncertain and researchers have attributed it to various dates ranging from the late 11th century to the early 18th century. The earliest known printings of the rhyme are from the late 18th century, but a related rhyme was written down a century earlier than that.

Historians of nursery rhymes disagree as to whether the lyrics of "Hark Hark" were inspired by a particular episode in English history, as opposed to simply reflecting a general and timeless concern about strangers. Those who link the rhyme to a specific episode identify either the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the 1530s, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the Jacobite rising of 1715. The most likely origin has it describing the arrival of King James 1st (in his velvet gown) at the English Court together with various impoverished Scottish nobility. Those who date it to the Tudor period of English history (i.e., the 16th century) sometimes look to the rhyme's use of the word ''jag'', which was a Tudor-period word for a fashionable style of clothing. But other historians ascribe no particular relevance to the use of that word.

Informal references to the nursery rhyme attribute the reason to the various enclosures acts whereby large landowners could appropriate smaller holdings merely by fencing them in.

"Hark Hark" survives to this day largely as a nursery rhyme. It has been sufficiently well known to permit writers to invoke it, sometimes in parodied form, in material not intended for children. This includes parodies by literary authors such as James Thurber and D. H. Lawrence. A few prose stories have used the rhyme as their source, including one by L. Frank Baum, author of ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz''.

The rhyme appears in the Roud Folk Song Index as entry 19,689.

Lyrics

As commonly published in the early 1800s, the rhyme was:

Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

Various published versions incorporate minor grammatical variations. More noticeably, many versions exchange the order of ''rags'' and ''jags''; some replace the word ''jags'' with ''tags''. A few versions specify that there is only one person wearing a velvet gown; at least one says that the gown material is ''silken'', not ''velvet''.

No particular ordering of ''rags'' and ''jags'' was dominant in the 19th-century sources. And although the use of ''tags'' was less common, it did appear in some of the early 19th-century publications. In Britain, it is found as early as 1832 in an article in ''Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine''. The rhyme, in slightly parodied form, appears on page 671. Even earlier than that, in 1824, it was used in an American book, ''The Only True Mother Goose Melodies''.

Some sources give the rhyme a second verse, whose first two lines are "Some gave them white bread / Some gave them brown". It is unclear why they associate the lines with "Hark Hark", because most sources give them as part of "The Lion and the Unicorn" (a nursery rhyme that is also included in the Roud Folk Song Index, as entry 20,170).

Initial publications

The first publication of the rhyme appears to be the 1788 edition of ''Tommy Thumb's Song Book''. As reported by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the rhyme was included in that text under the title "Hark Hark". It is not known whether it was included in any earlier edition of the ''Song Book'' (whose first edition was in 1744). The rhyme saw at least one other pre-1800 publication—the 1784 first edition of ''Gammer Gurton's Garland''. The evidence for this is indirect. It appears in the 1810 second edition of ''Gammer Gurton's'', the Preface of which states that Parts I and II of the book were "first collected and printed by a literary gentleman deceased", but that Parts III and IV "are now first added". "Hark Hark" appears in Part II. The rhyme's appearance in the 1794 edition is corroborated by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Origins

The origins of "Hark Hark" are uncertain. Various histories of nursery rhymes have offered competing theories on the matter, as have authors who write about other aspects of English history.

One modern history, by Albert Jack, offers two theories of the rhyme's origin, each one dating it to a specific episode in English history. The first theory places it during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. According to the theory, the Dissolution would have caused many people (not just the monks, but others who were economically dependent on the monasteries) to become homeless and to wander through towns seeking assistance. The other theory dates the rhyme to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Dutch William of Orange took the English throne. In support of this theory, Jack notes that the word "beggar" might have been seen as a play on the name "Beghard", a Dutch mendicant order widespread in Western Europe in the 13th century. Another modern history (by Karen Dolby) presents similar theories. It cites the Glorious Revolution and also admits a possible origin in the Tudor period, though without specifying the Dissolution as the precipitating episode.

An oft-quoted 19th-century compilation of English nursery rhymes, that of James Halliwell-Phillipps, does not offer any theory as to the rhyme's origins. But it classifies "Hark Hark" as a "Relic", even though it classifies others as "Historical".

Dating the rhyme's origin is confounded by the existence of another that shares the same first line and overall structure. A lyric appearing in a hand-written text from 1672, also titled "Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark", is not a nursery rhyme and does not address beggars. Instead, its first verse reads:

Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
My wife is coming in,
With rogues and jades and roaring blades,
They make a devilish din.

When discussing a different song in his ''English Minstrelsie'' (1895), Sabine Baring-Gould touches upon the 1672 lyric and notes its similarity with the nursery rhyme. However, he states that the nursery rhyme is the later of the two, describing it as a " Jacobite jingle" that arose in the years after the House of Hanover gained the English throne in 1714. But Baring-Gould also notes the similarity of the opening line to one used by Shakespeare in '' The Tempest''—"Hark, hark! the watchdogs bark!". ''The Tempest'' is believed to have been written at about 1610.

The precise meaning of ''jags'' might also play a role in dating the rhyme's origins. In the mid-1800s, English provincial dictionaries did not recognize it as a word for any type of garment. But they did recognize the phrase ''rags and jags'', which was understood to mean remnants or shreds of clothing. However, the word had a different clothing-related meaning in earlier centuries. In the 1400s, the word was used to describe a fashion, first popular in Burgundy, of slitting or otherwise ornamenting the borders or hems of a garment. Over time, the word's meaning changed to describe the newer fashion of cutting slashes into the fabric of a garment to reveal the material being worn underneath. With this latter meaning, ''jags'' entered the vocabulary of Tudor-era writers. In one of his contributions to the ''Holinshed's Chronicles'' (1577), William Harrison used the word to describe current fashions in England—"What should I say of their doublet