As I Was Going By Charing Cross - Origin

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.