As I Was Going to St. Ives

DESCRIPTION: "As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kirs: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, How many were going to St. Ives?"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1844 (Halliwell); reportedly found in a Harley MS. of c. 1730 (source: Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes)
KEYWORDS: travel riddle
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 61, "As I was going to St. Ives" (1 text)
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 462, "As I Was Going to St. Ives" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #678, p. 270, "(As I was going to St. Ives)"
Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel, p. 7, "As I Was Going to St Ives" (1 text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 183, "As I Was Going to St Ives" (1 text)
Greenway-FolkloreOfTheGreatWest, p. 63, "(As I was going to St. Ives)" (1 text)
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal, John Foster West, "Folklore of a Mountain Childhood," Vol. XVI, No. 3 (Nov 1968), p. 168, "(As I Was Going to Saint Ives)" (1 text); article reprinted (with text reset) in Vol. LII, No. 3 (Nov 1968), p. 11
Roud #19772
NOTES [76 words]: Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel claims that a similar trap is found in the famous Rhind Papyrus, an Egyptian mathematical text of around 1650 BCE. It is #79 in that work -- but the problem doesn't have the same hook at the end. It has seven houses, seven cats per house, which catch seven mice, each of which would have eaten seven heads of grain, each of which would have produced seven hekats of yield, and the question is how many items are to be counted up. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: OO2462

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