the persistence of nursery rhymes

I was looking up the little rhymes we have been discussing, and right
with them in a collection of English Mother Goose rhymes from the 127th
century was "This is the way the ladies ride...."

Just last week my teenaged grandson was bouncing his much-younger
brother on his knee, reciting that little rhyme. I'm sure he didn't
learn it from a book, just the usual way, passed down orally through
the generations, from his mother, who was dandled that way by her
mother, me, who learned it from her mother...across at least 400
years. The persistence of those little nursery rhymes.

I have read that "Baa Baa Black Sheep" refers to the Enclosure Acts of
the early 18th Century, and that London Bridge really did fall down.
And of course we have the plague immortalized in "Ring Around the Rosy."

Katy