How Does a Cow Horn Get Crumpled?
Those who know the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built seem to ponder about the phrase cow with a crumpled horn seems to be more used than understood. The cow tossed (or charged at) a dog and also was milked by the maiden all forlorn, but this all we can learn from the rhyme. Is it a horn bent in on itself? Or crushed down? Certainly there are a number of English pubs called The Crumpled Horn in London, Cornwall and Swindon. But what does it actually mean? First it is unusual now to say a cow has horns. British cows with horns are the Scottish highland cattle and the Jersey and Guernsey breeds. (Nursery rhyme readers will remember an Alderney in The Kings Breakfast from When We Were Very Young, Alderney being another Channel island.) It must be a female cow because it is milked, and you obviously cannot milk a bull. The Victoria Government on October 6, 1857 refers to a “white cow, black head and neck, crumpling horns, notch both ears” (a white cow with a black head and neck is no
