"Matthew, Mark, Luke and John", also known as the "Black Paternoster", is an English children's bedtime prayer and nursery rhyme.

It is related to other prayers, including a "Green" and "White Paternoster", which can be traced to late Medieval England and with which it is often confused.

The most common modern version of the verse is as follows: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on.

[2] However, the first known record of the lyrics in English is from Thomas Ady's witchcraft treatise A Candle in the Dark, or, a treatise concerning the nature of witches and witchcraft (1656), which tells of a woman in Essex who claimed to have lived in the reign of Mary I (r. 1553-8) and who was alive in his time and blessed herself every night with the "popish charm": Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, The Bed be blest that I lye on.

[2] George Sinclair, writing of Scotland in his Satan's Invisible World Discovered in 1685, repeated Ady's story and told of a witch who used a "Black Paternoster", at night, which seems very similar to Ady's rhyme: Four newks[note 1] in this house, for haly Angels, A post in the midst, that's Christ Jesus, Lucas, Marcus, Matthew, Joannes, God be into this house, and all that belangs us.

[2] A version similar to that quoted at the beginning of this article was first recorded by Sabine Baring-Gould in 1891, and it survived as a popular children's prayer in England into the twentieth century.

[6] After the Reformation this "White Paternoster" was among a number of prayers and devotions that were converted into magical rhymes,[9] becoming widely known charms.

[11] Anthropologist Margaret Murray suggested in her controversial 1933 book The God of the Witches[12] that the names of the two companion verses could be interpreted as "a confused version of a Christian prayer or hymn":[13] John Rutter set the lyrics of the nursery rhyme for choir a cappella in the collection Five Childhood Lyrics, first performed in 1973.

[2] A version from the United States recorded in 1900 began: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Saddle the horse till I get on...[2]