"Oranges and Lemons" is a traditional English nursery rhyme, folksong, and singing game which refers to the bells of several churches, all within or close to the City of London.

[2] The tune is reminiscent of change ringing, and the intonation of each line is said to correspond with the distinct sounds of each church's bells.

Today, the bells of St Clement Danes ring out the tune of the rhyme—as reported in 1940 the church's playing of the tune was interrupted during World War II due to Nazi bombing of the church during the Blitz.

Collector of British folk songs, James Madison Carpenter, recorded two versions of the song in the 1930s which are now available on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website: one in Garsington, Oxfordshire,[5] and another somewhere in either Yorkshire or Lincolnshire.

The challenge comes during the final lines beginning "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head"; and on the final repetition of "chop" in the last line, the children forming the arch drop their arms to catch the pair of children currently passing through.

[1] There is considerable variation in the churches and lines attached to them in versions printed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which makes any overall meaning difficult to establish.

The final two lines of the modern version were first collected by James Orchard Halliwell in the 1840s.

[9] Similar rhymes naming churches and giving rhymes to their names can be found in other parts of England, including Shropshire and Derby, where they were sung on festival days on which bells would also have been rung.

[1] The identity of the London churches is not always clear, but the following have been suggested, along with some factors that may have influenced the accompanying statements:[1] Bob Chilcott's "London Bells", the third movement of his Songs and Cries of London Town (2001) is a setting for choir of the song's version from Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book.

[13] Benjamin Till composed music based upon the nursery rhyme which was performed in 2009 at St Mary-le-Bow, London, to commemorate 150 years of the Palace of Westminster's great bell, Big Ben.