Jack sits in his corner, fishes a plum out of his Christmas pie, and congratulates himself for it. Short, smug and satisfying, it is one of the best-known rhymes in the whole Mother Goose canon.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating of Christmas pie:
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
How it's usually said today
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating his Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
Traditional rhymes have no single fixed text. The main version on this page is as printed in our source edition; this one is the wording most people say today.
About this rhyme
Roud 13027 · In print by the 1720s
The story you often hear is that Jack Horner was really Thomas Horner, steward to the last Abbot of Glastonbury, and that the plum was a property deed smuggled to safety inside a pie during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. It is a good story. Folklorists don't buy it. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud point out that nothing links the tale to the rhyme except the surname, and the family who came to own the manor have long said it isn't true. The rhyme itself first turns up in print in the 1720s.
It is built around one action: thumb in, plum out. Let a child do the digging motion, then the proud 'What a good boy am I!' with chest puffed out. A nice one after pudding, or at Christmas.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition