As I Was Going to St Ives Lyrics
Seven wives, seven sacks, seven cats, seven kittens. The numbers pile up so fast that most listeners start multiplying before they notice the trick in the very first line.
As I Was Going to St Ives
As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/as-i-was-going-to-st-ives/
- Type
- Counting Rhymes, Mother Goose
- Tune
- Spoken riddle
- Best for ages
- 5 to 10 years
What Does As I Was Going to St Ives Mean?
It is a riddle. The speaker meets a man with seven wives on the road, and each wife carries sacks of cats with kittens. The question at the end asks how many were going to St Ives.
The classic answer is one. Only the speaker was going to St Ives. Everyone else was met along the way, which means they were probably coming the other way. Some people argue the group could have been heading the same direction, and that argument is part of the fun.
History and Origin
A version of the riddle was already written down in the early 1700s, and it appears in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England in the 1840s. There are two towns called St Ives in England, one in Cornwall and one in Cambridgeshire, and both are happy to claim it.
The idea is much older than either town. A math problem in the Rhind Papyrus, copied in Egypt more than 3,500 years ago, also multiplies by seven: seven houses, 49 cats, 343 mice, and so on. Nobody knows whether the two are connected, but it shows that children, and teachers, have enjoyed this kind of puzzle for a very long time.
Learning Activities
- Do the math: 7 wives, 49 sacks, 343 cats and 2,401 kittens make 2,800. Add the man and the speaker and you get 2,802.
- Draw it: ask younger children to draw one wife with seven sacks, just to see how quickly the numbers grow.
- Riddle swap: after this one, let each child ask the family a riddle of their own.