Mother Goose Rhymes and the Middle Ages Medieval children learned rhymes and songs from the oral repetition of adults. As many as a quarter of the 550 texts in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes are accurately dated before the 15th Century; many were only oral rhymes and not written down until decades after they were first popularly recited. In 1978, Helen Cooper pointed to a much larger body of potential medieval nursery rhymes, which she collected …showed first 75 words of 3003 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3003 total…