A charm against rain

Little children have a custome, when it raines to sing, or charme away the Raine: thus, they all joine in a Chorus, and sing thus. viz

Raine, raine, goe away,
Come again a Saterday.

I have a conceit, that this childish Custome is of great antiquity: and that it is derived from the Gentiles.*

*Gentiles: the ancient pagans

John Aubrey (1626–1697)

from Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1688)


The rhyme was ‘Rain, rain, go away, / Come again another day’ in the fifties and early sixties when I was a child. At that point the custom was well over three centuries old, since Aubrey’s note implies, I think, that he remembered it from his own childhood, in the 1620s and 1630s. How old it already was by that time, who can tell? I wonder if children still say it. I haven’t heard it for years, but then I don’t have much to do with small kids these days.


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