Merry Old Soul

What say we introduce a note of fun and levity to 'Readin', wRitin’, ‘Rithmetic and hist'Ry Wednesday'.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,

and a merry old soul was he;


He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl


And he called for his fiddlers three.


Every fiddler had a fine fiddle, and a very fine fiddle had he;


Oh there's none so rare as can compare


With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

In their intensive study of ancient English history, somehow The Prude and her class missed this charming man.

There really was a King Cole-ish personage. Possibly.

He really was a king of goodly portion of England. Historians think.

He was an ancestor of King Arthur AND Merlin. If they existed.

He was a Christian who helped defend his faith and people after the Romans up and abandoned the entire island of the Britons, and raised a son who would carry on the family business of defending the faith so well he would achieve sainthood. At least that is the story.

Now that The Prude has made her journalistically correct disclaimers about her sources, let's move on to the fun stuff:

-His name was spelled ‘Coel’ and pronounced ‘Coil’.

-He lived to be 70 years old, an astonishing feat in those difficult days which won him the name ‘Old’.

-When he called for his pipe it wasn’t to partake in tobacco. Smoking wasn’t invented yet. It was most likely a musical instrument.

Isn’t it nice to picture him tootling merrily on his pipe as his fine fiddlers fiddled? His bowl, however, no doubt held ale or mead which made him merry indeed.

-The Tudor kings, starting with Henry VII, claimed to be descended from King Cole to legitimize their claim.

-For some inexplicable reason there is a statue of Old King Cole in Japan.

-This Norman Rockwell painting is the closest she could find in her house of something related to Old King Cole. She really thinks Norman should have painted the merry soul.