the weasel was the iron form on which shoes and boots were made . to pop the weasel was to pawn it for money at the pawn shop .The eagle pub still exisists in city road london ,an area once known for it’s cobblers .
Welcome to the board, paul turner and thanks for your comment. It to have a link to the column so others can see what you are commenting on.
Here is a link to the column: What does “pop goes the weasel” mean?
DrMatrix - Moderator
Sounds like caca to me. “A penny for a spool of thread/ a penny for a needle/ that’s the way the money goes” clearly means he’s spending money on a spool of thread and needle, not getting money from them. If he was getting money, it wouldn’t be “money goes”.
Furthermore, the song isn’t “go pop the weasel”. It’s “pop goes the weasel”. If it were about pawning your coat or weasel or whatever, it would be an instruction (imperative command), not a statement of occurrence.
The weasel popping when full of thread makes the most sense. Of course, my take is that it’s a play on words that a cobbler’s bench has a “weasel”. The song lyric sounds pretty straightforward to me.
'Round and 'round the cobbler’s bench
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought it wall was in fun.
POP goes the weasel.
The monkey is having fun chasing the weasel in a game of tag, but the weasel is scared for his life. So the weasel turns around and knocks the shit out of the monkey. That explanation also works with “mulberry bush”.
Real life example: we used to have a Siamese cat. She was indoor/outdoor. Every once in a while, one of our dogs would get loose while she was around, and run up to check her out. She would rear back and do the puffy cat thing, with the dog sitting right in her face. She’d pull back a paw and then give us a look that said, “Get this damn dog out of my face right now!” Because usually we’d be coming up right about then to sort things out.
One day my sister and I were out for a walk and some neighbor dogs came up to visit us. Right about then we noticed the cat following us (she would do that sometimes). The dogs quickly went over to check her out. This time she didn’t hesitate. One of the dogs, a big lab, got right in her face. Suddenly she launched up and tagged him on both sides of the head simultaneously, one paw each side. Pop Dog definitely got out of the way.
The song made so much more sense to me after that.
Michael Quinion, the owner of worldwidewords is a respected word researcher. You might find what he has to say interesting. Just click on the link I provided.
Perhaps everyone is correct.
hello to all; this is my first post. i would just like to add to this thread. yes a weasel was a tool used by the hat makers of old england either an iron or a small hammer.it was used to pound the felt in shape. and i understand the men absorbed through their skin alot of mercury used in the work on hats. which eventually affected them mentally among other illness and in cases death. so they drank alot for their mental state and run out of money between paydays.not in all cases. so they kept pawning their tool and got it back on payday. oh yeah and the mercury on the brain hence the term Mad as a Hatter. thank you
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, drohegda, we’re glad to have you with us. Please note that you’re posting to a very old thread (the last prior post was 2003), and that was paul turner’s first and only post, so don’t be surprised if there’s not response from him! 
Also, with regard to “mad as a hatter,” you might be interested in this: What caused the Mad Hatter to go mad? - The Straight Dope … which I wrote, lo these many years ago.
I have one book that claims the weasel (the item being pawned) is a glass eye. Glass eyes were commonly pawned when money was tight, and thus, “pop goes the weasel”.
The book was about strange collections and one of the chapter was an article about people collecting glass eyes, and some of the collectors say that they get many of their specimens from pawnshops.
I have no idea why a pawn shop would take a glass eye as a loan guarantee. It’s not like you can resell it if the person didn’t pay back the loan. I can’t imagine their’s a big secondary market for this type of thing.
Old Pawn Joke:
A man runs into a pawn shop and asks if he can pawn his brand new Lexus for a few weeks.
“Sure”, said the Pawn broker. “I’ll give you $500, and you pay me 10% interest back in two weeks when you pick it up, so you’ll owe me $550.”
“Great!”, says the customer. They fill out the paperwork, and the pawn broker hands the owner $500. The owner parks the car in the back of the pawn shop.
Two weeks later, the man returns with $550 and the pawn broker hands him back the keys.
“Before you leave”, says the pawn broker. “I need to know why you needed to pawn your car for $500. I checked your credit, and you have millions of dollars in the bank, and any bank would have loaned you the money if you really needed it. Why did you pawn your car?”
The man replies, “Airport parking is outrageous. They charge a few hundred dollars to park your car there for two weeks. Here, I can park my car for only $50”.
Okay, so apparently there are any number of verses and versions of the song, with the only constants being the tune and the refrain is “Pop goes the weasel”.
I still think “pop goes the weasel” to mean pawning something (whether it is a coat or a cobbler’s tool) seems contrived. It doesn’t scan grammatically. I could accept there being one verse using an existing refrain and playing on “to pop” meaning pawning, but not consistently through the song.
Now if the weasel was a some kind of tool on a rope, and the monkey were chasing this dangly thing around and around, and then suddenly the thing came to the end of the rope and sprung back on him, popping him in the face - yeah, that would make sense. But I seem to be making that up.
And can you explain perhaps how one performs their job when the tool they need to do the job is in the hock shop?
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they have several in the shop. They don’t only have one each - they have spares in case of breakages or loss. But the spares belong to the boss and he would notice if one went missing permanently. But you could hock one Thursday night and then buy it back Friday night after you’ve been paid. Sneak it back into the shop late Friday or Saturday morning, the boss would never know it was gone
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they don’t use the iron (or hammer or whatever it is) all the time constantly in making the shoes. Maybe they spend an hour hammering and then an hour shaping or something. During that hour not hammering, the colleague who pawned his hammer borrows yours and you work it out across the shop, passing the hammers around to cover for the guy who pawned.
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there’s loads of cobblers shops in the area and they all know each other - they get drunk together down the Eagle and the music halls. They just borrow a spare hammer (or iron) from a mate who works in another cobblers down the road. And then give it back when they’ve recovered the one they sold.
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worst case scenario - the pawn shop has sold it when you go back. In that case you just have to buy a new one to replace it and take the hit. But 99 times out of a hundred it probably works as a trick to get an advance on your wages
Anyone got a reliable cite that weasel is a cobbler’s tool? The OP claims it is a"iron form on which shoes and boots were made." That is actually called a last. Wiki has no entry for a cobbler’s weasel. But weasel & stoat = coat is listed in many dictionaries of rhyming slang.
And Irishman, you say that “It doesn’t scan grammatically,” but it is a frequent construction in British usage. Perhaps you are just better educated than the majority of mid-19th century Londoners.
No one seems to have considered the possibility that it could simply be a nonsense line.
The first verse of the song that I am familiar with - involving rice and treacle - is a perfect fit for the pawning explanation but the second, involving the monkey could easily support the nonsense idea.
Anytime one reads a folk or other song lost to the mists of time, it is quite likely it had sexual connotations — since poor people back then had not much to think about other than getting their next meal; were randy little sods; and enjoyed wordplay.
In Jazz, for example, ‘Jass’ itself was dubious, and terms such as Jelly-Roll, Gig, and Boogie-Woogie had especial meanings for the players not for the profane.
In this context, much seems clear:
Every night when I go out
the monkey’s on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.
A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That’s the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
Folk songs and nonsense songs seldom had sexual contexts at their core.
As to throwing in something about “jazz”—terms like “Boogie-Woogie” and “gig” are terms that come into jazz rather late. Later than the origin of jazz.
As to your knowing what the two stanzas of “pop goes the weasel”–I don’t see anything clear.
The next thing you’re going to be telling me is that Puff the Magic Dragon had nothing to do with marijuana.
Just because its nonsense doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense! We’ll make sense of it if its the last thing we do. 
If Pop Goes the Weasel had any meaning, it was lost long, long ago. Plenty of people have various theories, but no proof. Heck, we’re still struggling with Hotel California and whatever Colitas are, and that was only written a few decades ago. What hope is there for a ditty that’s several centuries old?
Nah. It’s settled. Colitas, that is. Maybe the Cecil column in 1997 didn’t clinch it, but multiple threads about the column since then have.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=522532&highlight=colitas
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=478891&highlight=colitas
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=123337&highlight=colitas
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=374582&highlight=colitas