Mother Goose, a nursery character who features in the title of innumerable books of nursery rhymes, was in origin a stock figure for a teller of tales. In France she was an old peasant woman who watched over the village geese. When Perrault's Histoires, ou Contes du temps passe, was published in France in 1697, the frontispiece showed an old woman telling tales by firelight to three children. A plaque on the wall reads "Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye." The earliest known publication of Perrault's fairy tales into English (1729) translated the plaque to read "Mother Goose Tales," thus introducing the name Mother Goose into the English language. "Mother Goose" was soon used in the titles of other children's books, such as Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody (ca. 1765), making her a figure to credit with nursery authorship along with such others as Tom Thumb and Nurse Lovechild.
