Old Eagle Review: Pop Goes the Weasel Is About Pawning

The rhyme names a real pub on the City Road, and it is about drinking your wages and pawning your coat

The Old Eagle on Royal College Street holds a 4.6 from eight hundred and twenty-four people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is one of the best-rated pubs in Camden.

And there is an Eagle in a nursery rhyme, and the rhyme is about debt.

The rhyme

Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle – that’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel.

Children sing it. It is taught in every primary school in Britain.

And it is about spending your wages in a pub and pawning your possessions to cover it.

Pop

To pop something is to pawn it.

It is documented slang, it was in common use in the nineteenth century, and it means exactly that: to take an object to a pawnbroker and exchange it for cash on the understanding that you will redeem it later.

Which a very large number of working people did, every single week, as a routine part of managing money.

You pawned on Monday and redeemed on Friday when you were paid.

The pawnbroker was not an emergency. He was a bank.

The weasel

Which is disputed, and we will give you the candidates honestly.

The commonly repeated explanation is that weasel and stoat is rhyming slang for coat – and that popping the weasel means pawning your coat, which is exactly what a man would do at the end of a heavy week.

The problem is that the slang is not clearly attested early enough, and a great many etymologists are unconvinced.

The alternative is a hatter’s tool, or a tailor’s iron, both of which were called a weasel – which would mean the song is about a working man pawning the tools of his trade.

Which is considerably darker, because a man without his tools cannot earn, and cannot therefore redeem them.

The Prat cannot resolve it and will not pretend to.

The Eagle

Is a real pub. On the City Road. It is still there.

It was a music hall and pleasure garden, and the rhyme is naming an actual establishment that people actually went to and actually spent their money in.

Which makes it one of the very few nursery rhymes with a verifiable address.

Which we keep finding

The lion and the unicorn is a political cartoon about the union, sung to five-year-olds with no context whatsoever.

Ring a Ring o’ Roses is probably not about the plague, whatever anybody tells you.

And Pop Goes the Weasel is about a man drinking his wages and pawning his coat, and we teach it to infants.

Verdict

Excellent pub, superb number, cheap.

Go, and do not pawn anything.

The three balls

Which hang outside every pawnbroker and which almost nobody can explain.

The usual account attributes them to the Medici, or more broadly to the Lombard bankers – and Lombard Street in the City is named after exactly those men, who were the moneylenders of medieval London.

And the symbol travelled with the trade.

The Prat has looked into it and can report, as usual, that the attribution is repeated everywhere and proved nowhere – and that there is a competing explanation involving St Nicholas, who is said to have given three bags of gold to save three sisters from destitution.

Which is the same St Nicholas who became Father Christmas, and the same three bags of gold, and we wrote about it at Patara.

The patron saint of pawnbrokers and the patron saint of Christmas are the same man, and it is the same story.

Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D.

Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and serves as Professor of Literature and Satirical Journalism at the university. Her scholarly work focuses on contemporary satire as a form of institutional critique, examining how exaggeration, irony, and absurdism function as sophisticated analytical tools for exposing structural inequality and institutional hypocrisy. Dr. Gustafsson has published extensively on the genealogy of satirical discourse, the relationship between speech acts and cultural power, and satire’s role as both aesthetic practice and epistemological strategy. Her research interrogates how contemporary satire operates within celebrity culture, legal systems, and institutional rhetoric, revealing the mechanisms through which power obscures itself through language and performance. Dr. Gustafsson’s work combines rigorous textual analysis with broader cultural theory, contributing significantly to understanding satire’s critical function in contemporary society. She is the author of Pearl Clutching and How to Combat It with Satire.