It has been argued that Little Boy Blue was intended to represent Cardinal Wolsey, who was the son of an Ipswich butcher, who may have acted as a hayward to his father's livestock, but there is no corroborative evidence to support this assertion.[1] The idea of a sheep eating in a meadow, or a cow eating in the grain field ("corn" means grain in this context) would have been horrifying to the people of the time, since heavy feeding on lush grass can make sheep sick (grass tetany,[2] for example) so the meaning of the rhyme was quite vivid in earlier times.