Humpty dumpty is an egg in the nursery rhyme. Always falling down, couldn’t be fixed. Those king’s men and horses couldn’t fix the broken humpty. So who or what was humpty, and when was he falling off the wall?

This rhyme tells us of events nearly 600 years ago, when the English Civil War was raging. A ‘humpty’ was term for a large thing- person, house, object. In the War, the king’s men built siege machines to help storm castles. One such machine was a very large cannon, used to attack Colchester. The rhyme teller mocks the king, his men, the gun, as it was very hard to fix.

The king lost the war, lost his head too.