Cockle bread

The play ''The Old Wives' Tale by George Peele, first published in 1595, has a reference to "cockle-bread". The editor of a 20th-century edition of the play, Charles Whitworth, points to the "cockle" as a weed found in corn and wheat fields, and suggests that "cockle-bread" was possibly an inferior bread, made from those grains, with the weed mixed into it. William Carew Hazlitt writing in Faith and Folklore: a dictionary'' in 1905, gives the same explanation of "Cockle Bread" as Whitworth. ==The "moulding" of cocklebread==

In the 17th century, a sexual connotation is attached not to the bread itself but to "a dance that involved revealing the buttocks and simulating sexual activity"; this activity was known as "moulding" cockle bread. John Aubrey writes of "young wenches" indulging in a "wanton sport" called "moulding of Cocklebread" where they would "get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather-up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading of Dough with their Arses". ==Nursery rhyme==

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Cockle-Bread became the name of a children's game, played to a nursery rhyme in which the bread is mentioned: Writing in Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain in 1854, John Brand describes the nursery rhyme as "modern", but adds that its connection to the earlier "moulding" of cockle bread "is by no means generally understood". == See also ==