See-Saw, Marjorie Daw, The Old Hen Flew over the Malt House

DESCRIPTION: "See, saw, Margery Daw, The old hen flew over the malt house, She counted her chickens one by one, Still she missed the little white one, And this is it, this is it, this is it."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1853 (Halliwell, according to Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes)
KEYWORDS: chickens nonballad
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Byington/Goldstein-TwoPennyBallads, pp. 117-118, "See-Saw" (1 text, 1 tune)
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 337, "See-saw, Margery Daw" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #578, p. 233, "(See, saw, Margery Daw)"; cf. #622, p. 247, "(See saw, Margery Daw)"; #624, p. 248, ("See Saw, Margery Daw)"
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 164, "See-Saw, Margery Day" (1 text)
Roud #13028
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "See-saw, Jack a Daw" (lyric form)
cf. "See-Saw, Margery Daw, Jacky Shall Have a New Master" (lyric form)
cf. "See-Saw, Margery Daw, Sold Her Bed and Lay On Straw" (lyric form)
NOTES [221 words]: Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes has two other entries with this first line: "See-saw, Margery Daw, Jacky shall have a new master" [Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 335] and "See-saw, Margery Daw, Sold her bed and lay upon straw" [Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 336], which see also.
In 1873, T. B. Aldrich wrote a story about Marjorie Daw (who did not actually exist); Benet, p. 691 (entry on "Marjorie Daw"). I don't know if the story inspired some of the rhymes, or whether they all predate it.
Thomas, p. 166, explains that "Margery Daw is an old English and Scotch term for idle vanity" -- but on the same page informs us that the 'Sold her bed and lay upon straw" version is about William Cecil, Lord Burleigh's entry into Gray's Inn in 1541 to study law. Since Cecil's title was "1st Baron Burghley," or "Lord Burghley," I leave it to the reader to decide how many of Thomas's hallucinatory ideas to swallow. The Opies, following the Oxford English Dictionary instead give "Daw" as a lazy person.
Daw is the name of the third shepherd in the famous Wakefield "Second Shepherd's Play," but I doubt that is relevant.
Roud lumps the various Margery Daw rhymes, which is certainly understandable, but they do not normally seem to have circulated as one piece, so I'd call them separate. - RBW
Bibliography

Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth edition edited by Bruce Murphy and published 1996 by Harper-Collins, but the "Marjorie Daw" entry was deleted in later editions)
Thomas: Katherine Elwes Thomas, The Real Personages of Mother Goose, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1930

Last updated in version 6.2
File: BGMG578

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