 From 1996 , the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary @-@ at @-@ the @-@ Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648 . In 1648 , Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall . The story given was that a large cannon , which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty , was strategically placed on the wall . A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground . The <unk> ( or Cavaliers , " all the King 's men " ) attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall , but the cannon was so heavy that " All the King 's horses and all the King 's men couldn 't put Humpty together again " . Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the <unk> : The Secret <unk> of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim . Elsewhere , he claimed to have found them in an " old dusty library , [ in ] an even older book " , but did not state what the book was or where it was found . It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme , and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme , which do not mention horses and men . 
