A Diller, A Dollar

DESCRIPTION: "A diller, a dollar, A (ten o'clock) scholar, What makes you come so soon? You us'd to come at ten o'clock, and now you come at noon."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1784 (Gammer Gurton's Garland)
KEYWORDS: travel
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 119, "A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar" (1 text)
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 465, "A diller, a dollar" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #81, p. 82, "(A diller, a dollar)"
Roud #19753
NOTES [289 words]: I know of few traditional collections of this item, and I have no idea what it means. But reading it in Baring-Gould, I remember the first two lines from somewhere, with a fragment of a tune (plus, according to Cyn Collins, West Bank Boogie, Triangle Park, 2006, there was in the Sixties and Seventies a folk music bar/club at the University of Minnesota called the "Ten O'Clock Scholar"), so I am very tentatively including the piece in the Index.
Neither the Baring-Goulds nor the Opies have any idea what this song is about. I will make a very tentative conjecture.
In the Middle Ages, "scholar" effectively meant "cleric," and clerics were expected to rise early to perform rituals at the canonical hours. So a good scholar should have been at service at (in modern terms) 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. A scholar who does not begin to work until 10:00 a.m. -- or, worse, noon -- is a poor scholar indeed. This would fit with the Opies' note that a diller is Yorkshire dialect for schoolboy who is backward in learning.
Of course, this suggestion probably requires that the piece go back before the Reformation, making it two and a half centuries old, at least, by the time it was printed in Gammer Gurton's Garland. Thus my suggestion is *very* tentative.
Katherine Elwes Thomas, whose suggestions about the origins of nursery rhymes make mine look rational, suggests on p. 215 ofThe Real Personages of Mother Goose (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1930) that the "ten o'clock scholar" was Charles I's Archbishop Laud. This is hardly better, from a chronological standpoint, than my suggestion, and Laud, whatever his theological and personal faults, placed substantial value on scholarship. So I truly find Thomas's suggestion unlikely. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: BGMG081

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