page_title: Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail of a page from the 1672 Westminster Drollery, showing the first three (of five) verses to a variant of "Hark Hark the Dogs Do Bark"
context_page_description: "Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark" is an English nursery rhyme. Its origins are uncertain and researchers have attributed it to various dates ranging from the late 1000s to the early 1700s. The earliest known printings of the rhyme are from the late 1700s, but a related rhyme was written down a century earlier than that.
  Historians of nursery rhymes disagree as to whether the lyrics of "Hark Hark" were inspired by a particular episode in English history, as opposed to simply reflecting a general and timeless concern about strangers. Those who link the rhyme to a specific episode identify either the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the 1530s, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the Jacobite rising of 1715. Those who date it to the Tudor period of English history sometimes look to the rhyme's use of the word jag, which was a Tudor-period word for a fashionable style of clothing. But other historians ascribe no particular relevance to the use of that word.
  "Hark Hark" survives to this day largely as a nursery rhyme. It has been sufficiently well-known to permit writers to invoke it, sometimes in parodied form, in material not intended for children.
context_section_description: The origins of "Hark Hark" are uncertain.  Various histories of nursery rhymes have offered competing theories on the matter, as have authors who write about other aspects of English history.
  One modern history, by Albert Jack, offers two theories of the rhyme's origin, each one dating it to a specific episode in English history.  The first theory places it during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s.  According to the theory, the Dissolution would have caused many people (not just the monks, but others who were economically dependent on the monasteries) to become homeless and to wander through towns seeking assistance.  The other theory dates the rhyme to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Dutch William of Orange took the English throne.  In support of this theory, Jack notes that the word "beggar" might have been seen as a play on the name "Beghard", a Dutch mendicant order widespread in Western Europe in the 13th century.  Another modern history (by Karen Dolby) presents similar theories.  It cites the Glorious Revolution and also admits a possible origin in the Tudor period, though without specifying the Dissolution as the precipitating episode.
  An oft-quoted 19th-century compilation of English nursery rhymes, that of James Halliwell-Phillipps, does not offer any theory as to the rhyme's origins.  But it classifies "Hark Hark" as a "Relic", even though it classifies others as "Historical".
  Dating the rhyme's origin is confounded by the existence of another that shares the same first line and overall structure.  A lyric appearing in a hand-written text from 1672, also titled "Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark", is not a nursery rhyme and does not address beggars.  Instead, its first verse reads:
  Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
  
  My wife is coming in,
  
  With rogues and jades and roaring blades,
  
  They make a devilish din.
  When discussing a different song in his English Minstrelsie (1895), Sabine Baring-Gould touches upon the 1672 lyric and notes its similarity with the nursery rhyme.  However, he states that the nursery rhyme is the later of the two, describing it as a "Jacobite jingle" that arose in the years after the House of Hanover gained the English throne in 1714.  But Baring-Gould also notes the similarity of the opening line to one used by Shakespeare in The Tempest—"Hark, hark! the watchdogs bark!".  The Tempest is believed to have been written at about 1610.
  The precise meaning of jags might also play a role in dating the rhyme's origins.  In the mid 1800s, English provincial dictionaries did not recognize it as a word for any type of garment.  But they did recognize the phrase rags and jags, which was understood to mean remnants or shreds of clothing.  However, the word had a different clothing-related meaning in earlier centuries.  In the 1400s, the word was used to describe a fashion, first popular in Burgundy, of slitting or otherwise ornamenting the borders or hems of a garment.  Over time, the word's meaning changed to describe the newer fashion of cutting slashes into the fabric of a garment to reveal the material being worn underneath.  With this latter meaning, jags entered the vocabulary of Tudor-era writers.  In one of his contributions to the Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), William Harrison used the word to describe current fashions in England—"What should I say of their doublets ... full of jags and cuts".  The word was used in the 1594 version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, where one character says to a tailor "What, with cuts and jags? ... Thou hast spoil'd the gowne."  And in the early 1700s, the anonymous translator of a 1607 book by an Italian writer also used jags in a specific clothing-related sense, linking it to garments made of velvet.
  But even amongst historians who date the rhyme to Tudor England, the extent to which their conclusions are based on the Tudor-era meaning of jags is not clear.  Historian Reginald James White unequivocally dates it to this period, but does not give a reason and, instead, uses the rhyme as part of his discussion of economic condition
caption: Three verses of a variant of "Hark Hark", from the Westminster Drollery (1672)
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