Needles and Pins

NEEDLES and pins,
Needles and pins,
When a man marries,
His trouble begins.

Needles and pins (or, as we more commonly say these days, ‘pins and needles’) is the tingling or pricking sensation you get when you’ve been sitting or lying in one position for too long and your foot or hand goes numb. There are no long-term effects – which makes it unlike marriage, the rhyme’s argument goes, where prickliness can last a lifetime.

This is a traditional rhyme, thought to have been written about Henry VIII and his troublesome wives, although arguably it should be the other way round as we all know that it was his wives for whom trouble began when they married the king. Except for Catherine Parr, of course, who managed to outlive him.

Needles and pins of a literal kind were one of the smaller (if still sharply pressing) problems Henry VIII encountered during his reign. At the time, most of them were made in the monasteries, so when their factories were closed down following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (see Little Jack Horner and Sing a Song of Sixpence), a huge vacuum was created in the marketplace. Pins and needles became very expensive and the king tried to rectify the problem by passing an act in 1543 encouraging industry of the day to manufacture more of them. The importance of pins, due to their relative scarcity, is reflected in this rhyme:

See a pin and pick it up,

All the day you’ll have good luck;

See a pin and let it lay,

Bad luck you’ll have all the day.