Was there actually a Mother Goose who wrote the delightful fairy tales and nursery jingles that all children love? Three different countries give three different answers as to who Mother Goose was.

In England, it was believed that Mother Goose was an old woman who sold flowers on the streets of Oxford. In France, there are people who believe that Mother Goose was really Queen Bertha. She married her cousin, Robert the Pious. Because he already had a wife, Queen Bertha was punished by the pope. One of her feet became shaped like that of a goose. From then on, she was called Mother Goose.

In the United States, there are some who say that Mother Goose’s name was Elizabeth Fergoose. She was the mother-in-law of a Boston printer who lived in the early part of the eighteenth century.

The first time the tales attributed to Mother Goose were set down was in 1696. For many centuries they had been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. But in that year, a French man called Charles Perrault wrote them down. His collection included Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Perrault sent the manuscript to a bookseller named Moetjens who lived at The Hague, in Holland. Moetjens published the tales in his magazine in 1696 and 1697. They immediately became popular. In 1697 a printer in Paris published eight of the tales in book form. The volume was called Histories or Stories of Past Time. On the cover was a little sign on which was written “Tales of My Mother Goose.”

So you see these tales and nursery rhymes have been told and read to children for hundreds of years. The earliest translation of the Mother Goose tales into English was in 1729.

We still don’t know who first wrote Simple Simon, Little Miss Muffet, and all the others which became part of Mother Goose. But in 1760 a collection of Mother Goose jingles was published in London, and about twenty-five years later it was reprinted and published in Worcester, Massachusetts.