In the nursery rhyme There was a little Nobby Colt what is a nobby colt? A colt by the way is a young male horse.
But what about a nobby colt? Of course Nobby as well as a nickname for someone called Clark also means someone posh, someone who is above themselves.
But can this be applied to a horse? Sometimes maybe, but not in this particular instance.
No, it is actually a piece of Berkshire dialect, referring to a young colt.
Since colt means young anyway, the nobby bit seems a bit superfluous, but of course not all dialect has to make sense.
The rhyme refers to going round the town of Woodstock, now known for the music festival which started in the 60s, which is of course in neighbouring Oxfordshire.
The colt is also known as known as Nobby, Nobby Grey, which kinds of confuses the issue.
Obviously the owner of the horse wasn't very imaginative, naming after what it was, a nobby colt and its colour.
The rhyme does go into strange details about the horse, that most of it is made of hay or straw.
Unless this is a metaphor for tangled hair it unlikely that this was a real horse, I should imagine...
Maybe the rhyme came from a toy horse.
The hay is described as 'pounce' which I haven't heard used as an adjective, and draw a blank.
It features in the 1843 book Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, 2nd edition, as well as in later editions.