Origin
The rhyme is thought to refer to the equestrian statue of Charles I (r. 1625-49) which was erected after the Restoration in 1660 and was moved in 1675 to the old Charing Cross in central London. The bronze statue is largely dark in colour, but the 'black' may refer to the king's hair colour.
The last line may refer to the reaction of the crowd when he was beheaded, or it may be a puritan satire on royalist reactions to the event. The rhyme may also have been produced out of a combination of existing couplets. A traditional London street cry was:
I cry my matches at Charing Cross,
Where sits a black man on a black horse.
A note in a seventeenth-century manuscript at Oxford contains the lines:
But because I cood not a vine Charlles the furste
By my toth my hart was readdy to burst
The first part was printed as a children's rhyme in a variation of the more famous "Ride a Cock Horse" in Pretty Tales published in 1808, with the lyrics:
Ride a Cock Horse,
To Charing Cross,
To see a black man,
Upon a black horse.
The modern version, which may combines elements of this rhyme with a reference to the execution of Charles I, was first collected and printed by James Orchard Halliwell in the 1840s.
Read more about this topic: As I Was Going By Charing Cross
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)