What does ring a ring a roses refers to?

Answer 1

Contrary to what many believe this is NOT about the plague. Like many attempts to attribute precise historical meaning to nursary rhymes this doesn't 'hold water'. It was first advanced in 1961 by the popular novelist James Leasor in his racy account of life in seventeenth-century London, The Plague and the Fire. Until then there was no obvious connection (and absolutely no evidence) that the rhyme had been sung in this form for almost 400 years as a way of preserving the traumas of the plague.

That's because it hadn't. The very earliest recorded version comes from Massachusetts in 1790:

Ring a ring a rosie

A bottle full of posie,

All the girls in our town

Ring for little Josie.

There French, German and even Gaelic version. Several have a second verse where everyone gets up again; others mention wedding bells, pails of water, birds, steeples, Jacks, Jills and other favourite nursary images. The most likely theory behind this nursary rhyme is that it developed with the ring game 'Ring a ring o' roses' (as ring-games were a staple-element of parties in a Protestant, eighteenth-century Brittain and America where dancing was forbidden), which still prevales as one of the most common ring games to this date.

Answer 2

Contrary to what many believe this is NOT about the plague. Like many attempts to attribute precise historical meaning to nursary rhymes this doesn't 'hold water'. It was first advanced in 1961 by the popular novelist James Leasor in his racy account of life in seventeenth-century London, The Plague and the Fire. Until then there was no obvious connection (and absolutely no evidence) that the rhyme had been sung in this form for almost 400 years as a way of preserving the traumas of the plague.

That's because it hadn't. The very earliest recorded version comes from Massachusetts in 1790:

Ring a ring a rosie

A bottle full of posie,

All the girls in our town

Ring for little Josie.

There French, German and even Gaelic version. Several have a second verse where everyone gets up again; others mention wedding bells, pails of water, birds, steeples, Jacks, Jills and other favourite nursary images. The most likely theory behind this nursary rhyme is that it developed with the ring game 'Ring a ring o' roses' (as ring-games were a staple-element of parties in a Protestant, eighteenth-century Brittain and America where dancing was forbidden), which still prevales as one of the most common ring games to this date.

Answer 3

This comes from the English smallpox epidemic and describes the sores that are round shape. The second line ashes, ashes all fall down describes the burning of bodies and homes as well as the massive death.

Answer 4

Ring a Round the Roses is a child's game. Many children love to play the game where they all fall down at the end of the song.