The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Vol 2 of 2): With Tunes, Singing-Rhymes, and Methods of Playing etc

In Short

This second volume of Alice Bertha Gomme's groundbreaking dictionary gathers, classifies, and dissects the traditional games played by children across England, Scotland, and Ireland. Arranged alphabetically from "Oats and Beans" through "Would You Know," the text preserves hundreds of localized variants of singing-rhymes, musical notation, and detailed rules of play. Beyond mere cataloging, Gomme appends an extensive concluding memoir on the study of children's games. She argues that these innocent street pastimes are not modern inventions, but rather living archaeological fossils. Through their dramatic structures, children unconsciously preserve prehistoric practices, ancient marriage ceremonies by capture or purchase, water-worship rites, and inter-tribal warfare. It has endured as an irreplaceable monument of folklore scholarship, capturing a vanishing oral tradition with rigorous field research and analytical depth.

The Story

The work opens with the continuation of the alphabetical dictionary of games, picking up from the first volume. Gomme meticulously documents each entry by providing its regional variants, musical tunes, and instructions for movement. In games like "Poor Mary sits a-weeping" and "Sally Water," circle-formations of children sing rhymes centered on grief, courtship, and eventual marriage. In "Sally Water," for example, a child in the center chooses a partner after sprinkling water, a sequence repeated across regional variations from Dorsetshire to Fochabers. Other entries, such as "Pize Ball," "Plum Pudding," and "Tops," record physical contests, marble games, and seasonal toy traditions, drawing on regional glossaries and antiquarian records to show how rules shift across county lines.

As the entries progress through games like "Three Dukes" and "Tom Tiddler's Ground," a clearer picture of social dynamics emerges. In "Three Dukes," lines of children advance and retreat in a contest of courtship and rejection, while in "Tom Tiddler's Ground," players trespass on a designated territory to pick up gold and silver while dodging a central captor. Games like "When the Peasant Sows His Stuff" recreate agricultural life through mimetic pantomime, where children physically imitate the actions of sowing, reaping, threshing, and resting.

After completing the dictionary entries and supplementary addenda, Gomme moves into the book's theoretical climax: her comprehensive "Memoir on the Study of Children's Games." Here, the descriptive survey transforms into a rigorous anthropological argument. Gomme systematically analyzes the structural forms of the games, dividing them into two primary categories: line games and circle games.

Line games, she argues, represent conflict, negotiation, and tribal rivalry between two distinct parties. They preserve the memory of historical period conditions when rival villages or tribes clashed, carried off brides by force, or negotiated bride-prices through diplomatic emissaries. Circle games, by contrast, represent internal community cohesion, religious observance, and shared village ritual. The joining of hands in a circle signifies alliance and kinship.

Gomme traces the roots of these play patterns to deep antiquity. The dramatic nature of children's play is not artificial; rather, it stems from a child's natural impulse to express thought through physical action rather than abstract language. By acting out what they observe or inherit, children become unwitting archivists. A game like "Sally Water" preserves ancient water-worship and purification rites associated with early Aryan and non-Aryan marriage customs. Games like "Round and Round the Village" preserve the periodic perambulation of parish boundaries, while funeral games like "Booman" or wake-games record ancient mortuary customs.

Ultimately, Gomme concludes that children's games are decaying survivals of early human culture. As modern schooling and urbanization alter traditional folkways, these singing-rhymes represent the final, fragmented echoes of early religious beliefs, tribal law, and social ceremonies, kept alive solely through the conservative nature of play.

How It Unfolds

The collection resumes — The dictionary opens with regional variations of singing games like "Poor Mary" and "Sally Water," detailing how children form circles, select partners, and act out verses of marriage, water sprinkling, and domestic life.

Sports and contests listed — The catalog documents physical pastimes and competitive games, including ball games like "Pize Ball," marble games like "Plum Pudding," and traditional street exercises like "Stroke Bias" or top-spinning.

Rivalry and courtship in lines — Entries such as "Three Dukes" demonstrate line-versus-line gameplay, where players advance and retreat to negotiate for brides, reflecting historical transitions from marriage by capture to marriage by purchase.

Agricultural and mimetic play — Games like "When the Peasant Sows His Stuff" demonstrate how seasonal labor and communal farming actions were transformed into rhythmic children's dances.

The theoretical memoir begins — Gomme transitions from documentation to analysis, classifying games into structural types—line formations and circle formations—to unlock their sociological origins.

Line games as tribal history — The author demonstrates that line games represent external conflict between opposing groups, preserving memories of inter-tribal battles, boundary disputes, and bride-capturing.

Circle games as sacred ritual — Circle formations are revealed as representations of internal village unity, preserving ancient religious observances, water-worship, perambulations, and sacred marriage rites.

Play as cultural fossil — The analysis concludes by showing how the child's natural reliance on dramatic physical action preserves prehistoric customs long after the adult world has forgotten their original meaning.

The People

Because this volume is a non-fiction treatise on folklore and anthropology, its "characters" are the symbolic figures who inhabit the game rhymes, alongside the scholars and informants who gathered them:

• Alice Bertha Gomme: The author and primary investigator. Driven by a desire to record vanishing folk traditions before modern life erases them, she meticulously collects, compares, and categorizes hundreds of game variants to prove that children's play is a living record of human history.
• The Rev. Dr. Gregor: A learned scholar and folk-lore collector whose death during the preparation of the volume left a significant mark on the work. His extensive field contributions from Scotland provided crucial evidence for regional game variations.
• Sally Water: The central figure of a widely distributed singing game. She sits weeping in a circle, chooses a lover, and is sprinkled with water, representing the bride in ancient water-worship marriage ceremonies.
• The Three Dukes: A group of suitors who advance in line formation to demand a maiden in marriage. They represent early diplomatic ambassadors negotiating bride-purchases or suitors executing traditional marriage-by-capture customs.
• Old Roger / Cock Robin: A deceased figure buried beneath an apple tree who dramatically rises from the grave to strike an old woman picking up his fruit. He embodies ancient burial customs and belief in reanimated spirits.

In Its Own Voice

"A custom is very low down among the strata of survivals when it is only to be recognised as part of a children's singing game..."

Gomme reflects on the extreme antiquity of "Sally Water," arguing that children have preserved crucial details of ancient water-worship rites that adult culture eventually abandoned.

"With the child the capacity to express itself in words is small and limited."

In her concluding memoir, Gomme explains why children rely on dramatic physical action, showing how play becomes the primary medium for preserving ancient cultural habits.

"The circle games I consider to be survivals of dramatic representations of customs performed by people of one village or of one town or tribe..."

The author contrasts line formations with circle games, establishing that holding hands in a ring signifies communal unity, internal sacred rites, and village alliance.

What It's Really About

Beneath its surface as a dictionary of children's play, the book is an anthropological study of cultural survival. Gomme argues that human culture does not disappear neatly when societal beliefs evolve; instead, discarded adult rituals sink into the realm of childhood. Children, operating through imitation and dramatic play rather than abstract history, inherit the shell of sacred rites—such as bride-capture, boundary-perambulation, water-purification, and funeral dirges—and keep them alive as games.

The work also explores the structural language of folklore. By analyzing how games are played—whether in opposing lines or unified circles—Gomme demonstrates that the physical mechanics of play carry as much historical meaning as the spoken words. Line games encode inter-group hostility and economic transaction, while circle games encode intra-group harmony and religious devotion. Ultimately, the book asks readers to look at the trivial pastimes of the street corner as profound, surviving fragments of primitive human civilization.

Why Read It Today

Folklorists, social historians, and lovers of regional culture will find this volume a captivating window into nineteenth-century British life. Reading it feels like eavesdropping on forgotten playgrounds across England, Scotland, and Ireland. The text is alive with regional voices, archaic dialects, forgotten nursery rhymes, and musical scores that convey the texture of village childhood before radio and television standardized entertainment.

The book is not without its reading challenges. Its encyclopedic structure requires patience, as dozens of minor textual variations for a single game are listed back-to-back. Modern readers may also encounter nineteenth-century anthropological terminology and period attitudes regarding primitive cultures versus civilized societies.

Yet what stays with the reader is Gomme's remarkable empathy and scholarly vision. She transforms what could have been a dry list of children's rhymes into a moving argument for the dignity of folk memory. The next time you see children playing a ring game on a playground, Gomme's insights will linger in your mind, reminding you that you are watching the distant, echoing performance of a ritual thousands of years old.