Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross

Horsing Around the Nursery - The Cock-horse as a Child's Toy

The cock-horse is an old-fashioned term used to describe anything a child rides on, particularly a hobby-horse or rocking horse. The hobby-horse is a horse's head on a stick. “ "Ride a Cock-Horse" captures a child's imagination with its allusions to traveling and seeing a lady. In Caldecott's illustration, the children are riding their hobby-horses down the road to see a fine lady (their mother who holds their sibling). The children look as if they are deep in their play with a stick for a whip in each of their hands.

Ian Penney's illustration portrays a more formal and posed version of child's play. Instead of a hobby-horse, this scene shows a rocking horse in a nursery filled with toys. The doll on the horse has fancy clothing with rings on her fingers and bells attached to the bottom of her shoes. The child who was playing in this room created a little town for the doll out of dollhouses. Some versions of this rhyme differ about whether the lady is on a white or a gray horse. This illustration shows the doll on a white horse, and shows a gray horse on the floor.

Caldecott's simple, and somewhat stark, sepia sketch of children's imaginative play stands in contrast to the colorful, toy-filled and childless, nursery of Penney's illustration. Perhaps Penney's missing child is off playing horsie with a broom stick.