Two friends build a house of rushes on the hillside, but the rhyme quietly notes that Bessy waits at the gate while Mary lives in plenty from the pantry. A small, wistful glimpse of old country life dressed up as a nursery song.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,
They were two bonny lasses;
They built their house upon the lea,
And covered it with rushes.
Bessy kept the garden gate,
And Mary kept the pantry;
Bessy always had to wait,
While Mary lived in plenty.
About this rhyme
Checked deliberately for the well-known Scottish legend attached to these same two names (two girls who supposedly died of plague near Perth after building a bower to escape it, c. 1645). That story belongs to a quite different ballad and is itself contested local tradition, not a confirmed source for this separate 'garden gate / pantry' nursery verse, so the draft is right to leave it out rather than present a shaky origin story as fact.
A rhyme built around two names, Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, said to have kept house together, one at the garden gate and one in the pantry. Beyond the rhyme itself there isn't much certain to say about them. It reads well as a simple call-and-response, one line for Bessy, one for Mary.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition