Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark

Those who link the rhyme to a specific episode identify either the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the 1530s, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the Jacobite rising of 1715.

The most likely origin has it describing the arrival of King James 1st (in his velvet gown) at the English Court together with various impoverished Scottish nobility.

Informal references to the nursery rhyme attribute the reason to the various enclosures acts whereby large landowners could appropriate smaller holdings merely by fencing them in.

A few prose stories have used the rhyme as their source, including one by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

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.

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.

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.

[17] 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.

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".

"[20] 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.

[21] 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.

[22] 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.

[26] 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.

[29] 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".

This is how it was used by an anonymous contributor to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, who was commenting on the general character of the Members of Parliament expected to be elected as a result of the soon-to-be enacted Reform Acts of 1832.

The contributor wrote that "it will be a strange sight to see the new delegates entering the metropolis, and will perchance remind you of your old nursery rhymes".

The cartoon lampoons Grover Cleveland's position on tariffs and changes the names of the garments to "Italian rags", "German tags" and "English gowns".

[33] And the rhyme was used by Theodore W. Noyes in his 1900 journalistic correspondence to the Washington Evening Star to convey his impressions of the Sultan of Sulu's retinue, who were meeting with an American diplomatic delegation.

Instead, it has appeared a few times as epigraphs to particular chapters in scholarly non-literary texts, including one written by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar[36] and another by South African journalist Allister Sparks.

When the Communist Party of Italy was formed in early 1921, writer D.H. Lawrence was living in Sicily and wrote a poem expressing his opinions of the group.

[41] James Thurber's 1950 fantasy novel The 13 Clocks has a prince deliberately trying to get arrested by the evil Duke of Coffin Castle, who has imprisoned a beautiful princess.

Mary Senior Clark used it for a two-part story that appeared in the November and December 1868 issues of Aunt Judy's Magazine, as part of its "Lost Legends of the Nursery Songs" series.

An anonymous author writing in 1872 for Scribner's Monthly used each of the rhyme's lines as the headings of separate sections of a much longer poem, "The Beggars".

[44] An 1881 publication saw Mary Wilkins Freeman using the rhyme as the basis for a 50-verse poem about the "beggar king" of an army, his daughter and the emperor.

[45] A parodied two-verse version is recited in the 1977 film The Prince and the Pauper, even though it does not appear in the original novel by Mark Twain.