According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Mother Goose is a:
”Fictitious old woman, reputedly the source of the body of traditional children’s songs and verses known as nursery rhymes. Often pictured as a beak-nosed, sharp-chinned old woman riding on the back of a flying gander, she was first associated with nursery rhymes in Mother Goose’s Melody (1781), published by the successors of John Newbery. The name apparently derived from the title of Charles Perrault’s collection of fairy tales Ma Mère l’oye (1697; “My Mother Goose”). The persistent rumor that Mother Goose was an actual Boston woman is false.”
According to the Mother Goose Society (Yes there really is a Mother Goose society.)
“Who was Mother Goose? Many she’s and he’s—different writers—in different times. The term has been traced to Loret’s 1650 La Muse Historique in which appeared the line, Comme un conte de la Mere Oye (“Like a Mother Goose story”). Two French Queen Berthas have been conjectured as a “Mother Goose” but there is no traceable evidence that either was the reference in Loret’s remarks.
In 1697 Charles Perrault used the phrase in a published collection of eight fairy tales which included “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Bluebeard,” and others. Although the book was titled, (translated from French) Histories and Tales of Long Ago, with Morals, the frontispiece showed an old woman spinning and telling stories, with a placard on the page which bore the words Contes de la Mere l’Oye (Tales of My Mother the Goose). Perrault thereby set the stage for the name to become a household word.” (or is that a household bird? Honk. Honk)
Mothergoose.com adds:
“Most of the tales included in any Mother Goose collection–and there are many such collections now–originated in the distant past as folk stories told to children. If there were an actual mother goose, she might well have been an 8th Century noblewoman named Bertrada II of Laon who, in 740, married Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, and in 742 bore his son Charles, immortalized as Charlemagne, the de facto founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Bertrada, who was a patroness of children and provided her over-achieving son his only education, was known as Berte aux grand pied, or Bertha Greatfoot, or Queen Goosefoot.
Whatever Bertrada’s role, by the mid-17th Century a mythical Mother Goose–mère l’oye–was widely acknowledged by French peasants and nobility alike as a fairy birdmother who told charming tales to children. Some of these stories were set down in print as early as 1637 in Giambattista Basile’s Italian collection of stories entitled The Pentamerone; others can be traced to another Italian, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, whose 73 folktales collected in Facetious Nights (1550-1554) were a source for plays by both Shakespeare and Molière.”
Many of our traditional Mother Goose rhymes are a tad different in their older incarnation.
We all know this one:
Jack and Jill went up a hill
to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down,
and broke his crown,
and Jill came tumbling after.
But there are more verses.
Apparently the whole
‘well episode’ was Jill’s fault and she paid dearly for it.