'''Little Jack Horner''' is a Nursery_rhyme. == Rhyme == :Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, :Eating a Christmas pie: :He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, :And said, “What a good boy am I!” ==Origins== Jack was actually Thomas Horner, steward to Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Legend has it that, prior to the Abbey's destruction during the Dissolution of the monasteries commanded by Henry VIII, the Abbot tried to avoid the event by sending Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie that had the deeds of a dozen manors hidden in it. During the journey Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the Manor of Mells in Somerset. While records do record that Thomas Horner ''did'' become the owner of the manor, both his descendants and subsequent owners of Mells Manor have claimed that the legend is somewhat libellous. A 16th-century rhyme noted :"''Hopton, Horner, Smyth and Thynne:'' :''When Abbotts went out, they came in.''" The first publication date for "Little Jack Horner" is 1725, but all the common English nursery rhymes were long in circulation before they appeared in print. Bob Dylan refered to the rhyme in a lyric, "Little Jack Horner's got nothing on me," from the song Country Pie, off of his album, Nashville Skyline. ==Other versions== In the European_Union, a new version of nursery rhyme has developed thus: :Little Jack Horner MEP :Sat in the corner of his SUV :Claiming his Christmas travel expenses. :He pulled out his pen, :and scribbled in ten :thousand Euros for a single first class trip to Strasbourg, tax free for us, the tax-payers, to foot the bill of - :we must be out of our senses! Another version is as follows: :Little Jack Horner :Sat in the corner :Watching the girls go by. :Along came a beauty and he said, "hi cutie!" :And that's how he got his black eye! American comedian George_Carlin offered this drug-related alternative (along with a version of Old_King_Cole that suggested that the King's pipe and bowl refer to marijuana): :Little Jack Horner :Sat in the corner :Eating his Christmas pie. :He stuck in his thumb, :And pulled out a plum, :And he said, "Holy shit, am I high!" ==Reference== *William Stuart Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, ''The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained,'' New York: Bramhall House Publishing, 1962 Category:Nursery_rhymes