The Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes are a collection of poems, riddles, and stories that originally were used as tools to educate, remind, or even scare children into a pattern of thought or behaviour. Although the origin of many, if not most of the rhymes, is impossible to determine, their content frequently refers to a specific historical event(s) or societal ill that has no obvious relationship to the starry-eyed innocence we often associate with childhood.