Los Cuatro Ojos

Pop Goes The Weasel… Ever Wondered Why The Weasel Goes “Pop?”

Round and round the cobbler’s bench
The monkey chased the weasel,
The monkey thought ’twas all in fun
Pop! Goes the weasel.

A penny for a spool of thread
A penny for a needle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! Goes the weasel.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

There has been much debate over the years about the meaning of Pop Goes The Weasel. A hugely popular music-hall song, its memorable and seemingly nonsensical lyrics spread like wildfire throughout Victorian London.

But is there more to the rhyme than meets the eye? In the 1680s, the poor and immigrants lived outside the walls of the City of London in Spitalfields, Hoxton and Shoreditch and slaved away in London’s textile industry, which was based there.

Packed with sweatshops, it was also the site of many music halls and theatres.

One theory suggests that Pop Goes The Weasel was an attempt to turn the grim reality of local people’s lives into a hit song.

In the textile industry, a spinner’s weasel was a mechanical thread-measuring device in the shape of a spoked wheel, that accurately measured out yarn by making a popping sound to indicate the correct length had been reached.

The mind-numbing and repetitive nature of the work is captured in the final line of each verse, indicating that whatever you were doing, or wherever your mind had wandered to, reality was never far away with the weasel to pop you alert again.