As I was going to St Ives

"As I was going to St Ives" Roud #19772
Written by	Traditional
Published	c. 1730
Written	England
Language	English
Form	Nursery rhyme/riddle

"As I was going to St Ives" is a traditional English language nursery rhyme which is generally thought to be a riddle. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19772.

Contents 1 Lyrics 2 Origins 3 Answers 3.1 Mathematical answer 4 Rhind mathematical papyrus 5 Use in popular culture 6 Notes 7 References 8 See also

Lyrics

The most common modern version is:

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

Every wife had seven sacks

Every sack had seven cats

Every cat had seven kits

Kits, cats, sacks, wives

How many were going to St Ives?^[1]

Origins

The earliest known published version of it comes from a manuscript dated to around 1730 (but it differs in referring to "nine" rather than "seven" wives).^[1] The modern form was first printed around 1825.^[1] A similar problem appears in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Problem 79), dated to around 1650 BC.

There are a number of places called St Ives in England and elsewhere. It is generally thought that the rhyme refers to St Ives, Cornwall, when it was a busy fishing port and had many cats to stop the rats and mice destroying the fishing gear, although some people argue it was St Ives, Cambridgeshire as this is an ancient market town and therefore an equally plausible destination.^[2][3]

Answers

All potential answers to this riddle are based on its ambiguity because the riddle only tells us the group has been "met" on the journey to St. Ives and gives no further information about its intentions, only those of the narrator. As such, any one of the following answers is plausible, depending on the intention of the other party:

• 1: If the group that the narrator meets is assumed not to be travelling to St. Ives (this is the most common assumption),^[1] the answer would be one person going to St. Ives; the narrator.

• 2802: If the narrator met the group as they were also travelling to St. Ives (and were overtaken by the narrator, plausible given the large size of the party),^[1] the answer in this case is all are going to St. Ives; see below for the mathematical answer.

• 2800: If the narrator and the group were all travelling to St. Ives, the answer could also be all except the narrator and the man since the question is ambiguous about whether it is asking for the total number of entities travelling or just the number of kits, cats, sacks and wives. This would give an answer of 2,800 — 2 fewer than the answer above.

• 2: Two is also a plausible answer. This would involve the narrator meeting the man who is assumed to be travelling to St. Ives also, but plays on a grammatical uncertainty, since the riddle states only that the man has seven wives (and so forth), but does not explicitly mention whether the man is actually accompanied by his wives, sacks, cats, and kittens.

• 0: Yet another plausible is zero, once again playing on a grammatical uncertainty. The last line of the riddle states "kits, cats, sacks, wives ... were going to St. Ives?" Although the narrator clearly states he is going to St. Ives, by definition he is not one of the kits, cats, sacks, or wives, and based on the common assumption that the party was not going to St. Ives, the answer is zero.

• 2752: The sacks are not a person or animal and therefore cannot be in the calculation. It was not the number of things, but of "persons" the narrator met. 49 adult cats 343 kittens per wife of whom he had seven (7 × 392) = 2744 plus the seven wives 2751 plus the man 2752 persons and animals.

• 9: There are nine people involved, who may be going to St. Ives. The animals are all in the sacks, so they, as well as the sacks themselves, are "being taken", rather than "going".

• 7: There are nine people involved, who are the only ones who may be going to St. Ives, all the others "being taken" there. But since the question is limited to "Kits, cats, sacks, wives", this excludes the man and the narrator, leaving seven.

Mathematical answer

The mathematical answer to the total number of people, sacks, and felines involved is 2,802, calculated as follows:

• Narrator: 1
• The man whom he met: 1
• Wives: 7

We're up to 9. Now we must consider how many entities accompany just one wife:

• Sacks: 7
• Adult cats: 49 (7 cats per sack, of which there are 7)
• Kittens: 343 (7 kittens per cat, of which there are 49)
• Total number of entities per wife: 399 (7 + 49 + 343)

There are 7 wives, so we multiply 399 by 7, which equals 2,793. Now we add the narrator, the man, and the man's wives (2,793 + 9), and the grand total is 2,802.

Rhind mathematical papyrus

A similar problem is found in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Problem 79), dated to around 1650 BC. The papyrus is translated as follows:^[4]

A house inventory:

			houses	7
1	2,801		cats	49
2	5,602		mice	343
4	11,204		spelt	2,301 [sic]
			hekat	16,807
Total	19,607		Total	19,607

The problem appears to be an illustration of an algorithm for multiplying numbers. The sequence 7, 7 × 7, 7 × 7 × 7, ..., appears in the right-hand column, and the terms 2,801, 2 × 2,801, 4 × 2,801 appear in the left; the sum on the left is 7 × 2,801 = 19,607, the same as the sum of the terms on the right. Note that the author of the papyrus miscalculated the fourth power of 7; it should be 2,401, not 2,301. However, the sum of the powers (19,607) is correct.

The problem has been paraphrased by modern commentators as a story problem involving houses, cats, mice, and grain, although in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus there is no discussion beyond the bare outline stated above. The hekat was ¹⁄₃₀ of a cubic cubit (approximately 4.8 l, 1.1 imp gal; 1.3 US gal).

Use in popular culture

• In the 1995 film Die Hard with a Vengeance, the rhyme is presented to the protagonists by the villain as a riddle, giving them thirty seconds to telephone him on the number "555 plus the answer" or a bomb would detonate. After several guesses, they eventually solve the riddle, calling the number 555-0001 which proves to be correct. They missed the 30-second deadline, but the bomb did not explode since the villain had not said "Simon says."

• The rhyme was recited by Mary Murphy's character while caring for a cat with seven kittens in the movie A Man Alone. Later the character played by Ray Milland who overheard the rhyme offers her the answer and Murphy's character explains that she alone was going to St. Ives.

• The rhyme was also the basis of a Sesame Street Muppet skit from the show's first season, in which the boy Muppet holding a numeral 7 sings the rhyme as a song to the girl Muppet twice (the second time, the girl is busy writing down the calculations) and finally, in keeping true to the spirit of the riddle, reveals the answer as 1 (the traditional answer), because he was going to St. Ives and the kits, cats, sacks and wives were going the other way. Then the girl turns the tables on the boy and asks how many were going the other way. She then reveals the mathematical answer from her calculations: 1 man + 7 wives + 49 sacks + 343 cats + 2,401 kittens, which comes to 2,801. Astonished, the boy responds, "How about that?!"

• The rhyme was also featured in a Pogo comic story, "More Mother Goosery Rinds" in which Albert Alligator himself portrays Mother Goose and Pogo a traveling musician. After going over several Mother Goose rhymes they get to the St. Ives riddle, albeit replacing "seven" with "forty" and while Albert (Mother Goose) keeps trying to cogitate the answer, Pogo boasts he knows it...and he answers "one", which baffles "Mother Goose" (Albert Alligator). Pogo says that if the kits, cats, sacks and wives weren't going to St. Ives, maybe they were going somewhere else, such as Altoona, Pennsylvania. So Albert again recites the riddle, this time ending with "Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to...ALTOONA??" But by this time, Pogo has already gone upon his way.

• Mad magazine used it in at least two articles over the years for the following parodies:

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

Of course, the seven wives weren't his

But here in France, that's how it is

and

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

I know this sounds absurd and loony

But that poor man was Mickey Rooney!

• British poet and humorist Colin West wrote a satire on "As I was going to St Ives", called "As I Went Down To Milton Keynes". The items listed are "a king with seven queens", and for every queen a prince, for every prince a princess, for every princess an earl, for every earl a lady, for every lady a baby, and for every baby a cat.

Notes

References

Oystein Ore, "Number Theory and its History", McGraw- Hill Book Co, 1944

See also

• Ancient Egyptian weights and measures