Here is a curious story of Cornish Sat margery Daw, evidently a dirty person, and one of Cornwall's ususal saints:

We have no reliable information of the birth, parentage, or education of Margery Daw, but we have a nursery rhyme which clearly indicates that she must have been a sloven—perhaps an.ancient picture of a literary lady, who was by her sad habit reduced to extreme necessity.

See saw, Margery Daw,

clearly indicates a lazy woman rocking herself, either in deep thought, or for want of thought.

Sold her bed and lay on the straw;

this was stage the first of her degradation.

She sold her straw and lay in the smut

the second and final stage, which may well induce the poet to inquire—

Was not she a dirty slut?

Another version of Margery's story is more distinct as to her end:—

See saw,
Margery Daw,
Sold her bed
And lay on the straw;
She sold her straw,
And lay upon hay,
So Piskies came and carried her away.

A friend, in writing to me on this dirty Cornish saint, is disposed to regard St Margery Daw as a very devout Roman Catholic, and to refer the version of her story which I have given first to the strong feeling shown by many Protestants against those pious women who rejected the finery of the world, and submitted for the sake of their souls to those privations which formed at one time the severe rule of conventual life. Margery and the fairies are supposed to have left England together at the time of the Reformation, but she has left her name to several Cornish mines.

Pay close attention to the old meanings of words in this story.

Hunt does a good job of picking out a meaning to some of what to us are sensational aaspects of the rhyme. St Margery was dirty because she renounced the conventional world.

Hunt ties St Margery's leaving and the leaving of the fairy together, and ties it to the time of the reformation and the struggle between Catholics and Protetant in England. Not bad for a short piece of ditty.