Do You Know the Muffin Man?

Yesterday, Emily came home from preschool, singing "Have you seen the muffin man?"

Now, I always thought that the lyrics to that catchy song were, "Do you know the muffin man?"

But then a lot of nursery rhymes are different in California than back in Britain.

And then I started thinking, "Well, who the hell was the muffin man, anyway?"

So whilst the song went round and round in my head, I decided to take my own trip down memory lane and investigate this important matter. Instead of cleaning the house, or making a delicious dinner for Jimmy, who is returning from two nights away, I find myself taking a tour of history on my favourite web sites, which usually begin with wiki.

(Whenever Henry asks me a question about a sea lion with elephant sized testicles (oh, that would be the Elephant Seal) or whether birds fart, I refer to a wiki site. Apparently birds do fart but you can't hear it or smell it because the stuff they eat doesn't make smells and they don't have any bottom cheeks to fart out of. I am not sure I agree in the case of vultures - I am quite sure that if they farted, it would smell bad. I mean, they eat rotting carcasses, don't they? I am sure somebody could get a Ph.D. on the back of that one. I will have to look it up. But later.)

So the first verse of the nursery rhyme goes,

"Do you know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Do you know the muffin man,
Who lives in Drury Lane?"

I discover that the concept of grocery delivery to your door is not a new one. So whilst I have blueberry and high fructose corn syrup muffins delivered to my door along with the rest of my food and wine, in the Victorian era, they had unsweetened muffins brought to the door by the muffin man.

The nursery rhyme appears to be about a specific muffin man, who lived in Drury Lane. Where or what is Drury Lane? It is a street in London, partly in Camden and partly in Westminster. It used to be where some posh bloke (man) called Sir William Drury lived.

Drury House got more interesting and became a pub, run by somebody's mistress, and by the 18th century, Drury Lane was one of the worst slums in London, full of whores and gin palaces. I like the sound of the pub and gin palaces.

So, by deduction, the muffin man on Drury Lane must have been delivering his wares to prostitutes and their customers. I wonder if the muffin man did a bit of muff-diving whilst completing his rounds.

Now, if the muffin man had been around a few centuries earlier, he may have been delivering to a street with a totally different name because it was normal for a medieval street name to reflect the activity taking place there.

The name Drury Lane may well have been Gropecunt Lane instead. This was a common street name in English towns during the Middle Ages, and was thought to refer to the loose-knickered (loose-pantied) activities in that area.

Luckily for us, the last recorded Gropecunt Lane was in 1561 and the name was usually changed to a less vulgar name such as Grape Lane.

Otherwise our kids may have come home singing,

"Do you know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Do you know the muffin man,
Who lives in Gropecunt Lane?"