BAA, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full;
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.
Some researchers believe this rhyme was written simply to encourage young children to imitate the sounds of animals when they are learning how to talk. But there’s a far more interesting and historic background to the poem. The version we all grew up with was in fact altered to make it more pleasant for young ears. The poem had a different last line until at least 1765, when it was included in Mother Goose Melody, published by John Newbery. The last line originally went like this: ‘And none for the little boy who cries in the lane.’
The surprising story behind this rhyme starts, unsurprisingly enough, with sheep. Sheep have been extremely valuable to the English economy for well over a thousand years. The wool trade in England was already thriving by August 1086 when the Domesday Book recorded that many flocks across the country numbered more than two thousand sheep. By the late twelfth century, sheep farming was big business and towns such as Guildford, Northampton, Lincoln and York had become thriving centres of production. By 1260, some flocks consisted of as many as seven or eight thousand sheep, each tended by a dozen full-time shepherds, and English wool was regarded as the best in the world. But as the cloth workers of Belgium and France were far more skilled than the English at producing the finished article, much of the wool produced was exported to Europe where the raw material was dyed and woven into high-quality cloth.
When Edward I (the Plantagenet king also known as ‘Longshanks’ – see Doctor Foster) returned from his crusading in 1272 to be crowned king, he set about the type of reforms his father, Henry III, had been unable to achieve. England had a growing number of wealthy wool merchants, chiefly in the form of the monasteries, and, thanks to the quality and reliability of English wool, an increasing number of eager buyers in the Italians and the Flemish, who dominated European business at the time. Naturally this also led to a growing number of traders and exporters and a great deal of money flowing into England on a regular basis. This, in turn, meant Edward was able to impose new taxes on the exports of wool to fund his military campaigns and keep the royal coffers topped up. In 1275, the Great Custom was introduced in the shape of a royal tax of six shillings and eight pence per wool sack – approximately one-third of the price of each sack. It was this wool tax that is said to be the basis of ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’: one-third of the price of each sack must go to the king (the master), two-thirds to the Church or the monasteries (the dame), and none to the actual shepherd (the little boy who cries in the lane). Rather than being a gentle song about sharing things out fairly, it’s a bitter reflection on how unfair things have always been for working folk throughout history.
Note: The black sheep of the family is generally regarded as a disgrace, different from the other members and with a rogue element implied. For thousands of years, a black lamb in a flock was always the unpopular one as its fleece could not be dyed and was therefore less valuable than those of the white lambs. It would therefore have been regarded as an unlucky omen, its presence disruptive to the rest of the flock. Thomas Bastard (yes, his real name) wrote a poem, published in 1598, in which he presents the black sheep as a predator: ‘Till now I thought the proverbe did but jest, which said a black sheepe was a biting beaste.’ And in 1892 Rudyard Kipling included in one of his own poems (‘Gentleman-Rankers’) the line ‘We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray, Baa-aa-aa!’, recalling both the rhyme and the proverbial waywardness of its woolly subject.
During this period of great success (for the ruling classes at any rate), England’s export of wool nearly doubled from 24,000 sacks to 47,000 sacks per year, and the money raised largely funded the Hundred Years’ War with the French that dominated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. To this day, the Lord Speaker in the House of Lords (successor to the Lord Chancellor’s role) sits on a sack made of wool, first introduced during the fourteenth century by the third consecutive Edward to rule England, Edward III.