Humpty Dumpty was not an egg

I have lived within reasonable distance of Colchester for most of my adult life, I even studied at the University of Essex between 2000-2004. For those unfamiliar with Colchester it is the oldest recorded town in Britain, a former Roman capital, a medieval fortress city, a place with two thousand years of documented history sitting quietly underneath a modern high street.

It has a castle that William the Conqueror built on the foundations of a Roman temple. It has walls that the Romans constructed, that was used throughout the medieval period and fought over in the English Civil War. It also has, if you believe the local tourist board (which I do, or did), a very specific claim to one of the most famous nursery rhymes in the English language.

Humpty Dumpty, they say, was not an egg.

He was infact a gigantic cannon that sat on the walls of Colchester Castle.

The Rhyme

Whilst the rhyme first appeared in print in the early nineteenth century, it was Lewis Carroll who transformed Humpty into a large human-like egg in Through the Looking Glass in 1871, and that image has taken centre stage ever since. This is a tad unfortunate because it makes the rhyme considerably less interesting than it actually is.

The egg was entirely Carroll's invention. The original rhyme contains no egg whatsoever.

Several theories have been advanced for the rhyme's true meaning. Richard III has been proposed, his defeat at Bosworth Field, his fall from power, the impossibility of restoration. Cardinal Wolsey has been suggested. Even King Charles I himself has been put forward, toppled from his throne by Parliament and quite literally unable to be put back together again after his execution in 1649.

But the theory that utterly captured my imagination during my student days well and truly belongs to Essex.

The Siege of Colchester, 1648

The English Civil War was, at its core, another English argument about who was really in charge, the King or Parliament. By 1648 it had been raging for six years. Charles I was a prisoner. His supporters planned a Scottish invasion while Royalists across England rose simultaneously in his defence.

The plan went wrong almost immediately. Royalist forces in Essex, attacked by the Parliamentary general Lord Fairfax, retreated behind the walls of Colchester. What followed was an eleven-week siege of real hardship for those trapped behind the walls.

Several cannons were deployed on the walls in defence of the city. The largest, placed on the wall beside St Mary's Church, was, according to local legend, nicknamed Humpty Dumpty. Afterall a 'humpty' was a common term at the time for something or someone large and unwieldy.

On the night of 14th July 1648, Fairfax launched a concentrated attack on the Royalist guns.

Parliamentary cannon fire damaged the wall beneath the great gun, sending it crashing to the ground below. The Royalists attempted to haul it back into position but the cannon was so heavy that, to borrow a phrase, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.

Colchester held out until late August before surrendering. Two Royalist commanders were executed on the castle walls. The city, battered and exhausted, opened its gates.

And somewhere in the wreckage, according to legend, lay the shattered remains of a very large cannon.

The Problem

Here is where honesty is required, because the historical record is considerably less tidy than the tourist board version suggests and I certainly was not told about this over 20 years ago!

Historians are genuinely divided on this one. No contemporary account names the cannon Humpty Dumpty. The rhyme itself doesn't appear in print until more than a century and a half after the siege. And the earliest suggestion that the rhyme relates to Colchester at all appears to date from the 1980s, which is, for something to have happened in 1648 is suspiciously recent.

Colchester's own local authorities eventually installed an interpretive panel acknowledging that the cannon story is probably legend rather than history. Most places would simply enjoy the legend. Colchester put up a sign questioning it. Own it. If you say something confidently enough then people will believe you. Humpty Dumpty was a cannon.

There is also a supposedly lost verse of the rhyme that appears to prove the cannon theory definitively, produced by an author who claimed to have found it in an old book in a dusty library but declined to identify either the book or the library. This is not, by any conventional measure, a compelling piece of historical evidence. And the date of this original lost verse was coined in the mid-1980s.

Why it doesn't matter

The siege of Colchester is entirely real. The walls are still there. St Mary's Church is still there. The castle is still there (it is very, very good). Musket ball holes can still be found in the timbers of some old buildings in the city. A cannon really was deployed on those walls. A cannon really did fall. The Royalists really were the king's men and they really couldn't restore what had been lost.

Whether or not a specific cannon was nicknamed Humpty Dumpty, whether or not someone composed a rhyme about it that two hundred years later became a children's nursery rhyme, none of that changes the fact that one of the most significant sieges in English history took place in an Essex town, that it helped determine the outcome of a war that ended with a king being executed, and that the world it produced shaped everything that came after.

History is full of stories that are better than the truth. The best ones sit exactly on the line between the two, plausible enough to believe, unverifiable enough to argue about, vivid enough to remember. That is precisely why they survive. And there is something rather wonderful about the possibility that a heavy cannon, sat on an Essex wall, knocked off by Parliamentary fire and impossible to restore, gave us the rhyme that millions of children have recited every day for two centuries without the faintest idea what they might actually have been talking about.

What child wouldn't like to hear that story.

Colchester Castle, one of the finest Norman keeps in England and a stone's throw from where Humpty Dumpty may or may not have sat on a wall, features in our blog on the five best medieval castles to visit with children.