The origins of "Hark Hark" are uncertain. Various histories of nursery rhymes have offered competing theories on the matter, as have authors who write about other aspects of English history. One modern history, by Albert Jack, offers two theories of the rhyme's origin, each one dating it to a specific episode in English history. The first theory places it during the
Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. According to the theory, the Dissolution would have caused many people (not just the monks, but others who were economically dependent on the monasteries) to become homeless and to wander through towns seeking assistance. The other theory dates the rhyme to the
Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Dutch
William of Orange took the English throne. In support of this theory, Jack notes that the word "beggar" might have been seen as a play on the name "
Beghard", a Dutch
mendicant order widespread in Western Europe in the 13th century. Another modern history (by Karen Dolby) presents similar theories. It cites the Glorious Revolution and also admits a possible origin in the
Tudor period, though without specifying the Dissolution as the precipitating episode. An oft-quoted 19th-century compilation of English nursery rhymes, that of
James Halliwell-Phillipps, does not offer any theory as to the rhyme's origins. But it classifies "Hark Hark" as a "Relic", even though it classifies others as "Historical". Dating the rhyme's origin is confounded by the existence of another that shares the same first line and overall structure. A lyric appearing in a hand-written text from 1672, also titled "Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark", is not a nursery rhyme and does not address beggars. Instead, its first verse reads: Hark, hark! the dogs do bark, My wife is coming in, With rogues and jades and roaring blades, They make a devilish din. When discussing a different song in his
English Minstrelsie (1895),
Sabine Baring-Gould touches upon the 1672 lyric and notes its similarity with the nursery rhyme. However, he states that the nursery rhyme is the later of the two, describing it as a "
Jacobite jingle" that arose in the years after the
House of Hanover gained the English throne in 1714. But Baring-Gould also notes the similarity of the opening line to one used by
Shakespeare in
The Tempest—"Hark, hark! the watchdogs bark!".
The Tempest is believed to have been written at about 1610. The precise meaning of
jags might also play a role in dating the rhyme's origins. In the mid-1800s, English provincial dictionaries did not recognize it as a word for any type of garment. But they did recognize the phrase
rags and jags, which was understood to mean remnants or shreds of clothing. However, the word had a different clothing-related meaning in earlier centuries. In the 1400s, the word was used to describe a fashion, first popular in
Burgundy, of slitting or otherwise ornamenting the borders or hems of a garment. Over time, the word's meaning changed to describe the newer fashion of cutting slashes into the fabric of a garment to reveal the material being worn underneath. With this latter meaning,
jags entered the vocabulary of Tudor-era writers. In one of his contributions to the ''
Holinshed's Chronicles'' (1577),
William Harrison used the word to describe current fashions in England—"What should I say of their
doublets ... full of jags and cuts". The word was used in the 1594 version of Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew, where one character says to a tailor "What, with cuts and jags? ... Thou hast spoil'd the gowne." And in the early 1700s, the anonymous translator of a 1607 book by an Italian writer also used
jags in a specific clothing-related sense, linking it to garments made of velvet. But even amongst historians who date the rhyme to Tudor England, the extent to which their conclusions are based on the Tudor-era meaning of
jags is not clear. Historian Reginald James White unequivocally dates it to this period, but does not give a reason and, instead, uses the rhyme as part of his discussion of economic conditions in 16th-century England. Shakespeare historian Thornton Macauley also is certain that the rhyme dates back to this period, but bases that finding on his belief that the "beggars" were understood to be travelling actors. Closer to using the word to date the rhyme to the Tudor period is Linda Alchin's
The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes. In her text, Alchin defines the word
jags and explicitly links it to Tudor-period fashion. But she does not go so far as to say that the use of the word itself dates the rhyme to that period. In his 2004 history of nursery rhymes, Chris Roberts discusses several of the varying theories on the origins of "Hark Hark". But he also opines that the rhyme has "a fairly universal theme" that "could be used to describe any time from the Middle Ages to the present day". In the 1830s,
John Bellenden Ker noted that many English sayings and rhymes seem to be gibberish or nonsensical (e.g., "
Hickory Dickory Dock"), but proposed that this was the case only because their original meanings have been forgotten. Ker believed those sayings and rhymes to be mis-rememberings of ones that were developed by the native English population in the decades following the
Norman conquest in 1066. The rhymes, said Ker, would have been made in the
Old English language, but their original meanings could be recovered if the modern words were understood to be sound-alike substitutions for the original. Ker also proposed that the closest known equivalent to Old English was the 16th century version of the
Dutch language, and that looking for sound-alike Dutch words would be sufficient for recovering the Old English meanings. Ker wrote several books exploring this theory, increasingly applying it to rhymes that were not gibberish or nonsensical. "Hark Hark" was addressed in the last of them. When analyzing it, Ker concluded that the word "bark" was a mis-remembering of
bije harcke, which he translated as "harasser of the bee" and then assumed "bee" to have been a metaphor that the Anglo-Saxon population used for itself. He also found the word "town" to be a mis-remembering of
touwe, meaning "rope", which he assumed to be a metaphor for a
hangman's noose. With these and several other similar inferences, Ker found the original meaning of "Hark Hark" to be that of political protest against the Norman government and the
Catholic Church (a conclusion he reached with most of the rhymes that he studied). Ker's theory was not well-accepted. In a contemporaneous discussion of it,
The Spectator found the theory to be a "delusion" and "the clearest case of literary mania we remember". His writings were still being discussed several decades later, and still not favorably.
Grace Rhys called Ker's theory "ingenious if somewhat
addlepated". And in the Preface of a
facsimile reprint of ''The Original Mother Goose's Melody'',
William Henry Whitmore noted Ker's work and added that "opinions differ as to whether he was simply insane on the subject, or was perpetrating an elaborate joke". ==Popular usage==