7
votes
"Old King Cole was a merry old soul" - and possibly a real king in post-Roman Britain
I'm reading a book called 'British Kings & Queens', and there's a mention of a king called Coelius, who may have been the inspiration for the nursery rhyme 'Old King Cole'.
I've done some research and found this local history about "Coel Hen (the Old) aka Coelius (of Ayrshire)" (sadly, the accompanying pictures seem to have disappeared).
He seems to have been in power around the early 400s A.D. - about the time that the Romans exited Britain. His domain included Ayrshire in modern-day Scotland.
Archive.org actually managed to capture all the images from that page, if you want to check them out:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120329121540/http://www.kylesociety.org/Kyle_OldKingCole.htm
And there also appears to be a wikipedia entry on him as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coel_Hen
Nice find for the pictures!
Yes, there's a Wikipedia page, but I don't post Wikipedia pages on Tildes.