From Gammer Gurton's Garland by Joseph Ritson (London: R. Triphook, 1810), page 32:

Snail, snail, come out of your hole,
Or else I'll make you as black as a coal.*

* It was probably the custom, on repeating these lines, to hold the snail to a candle, in order to make it quit the shell. In Normandy it was the practice at Christmas, for boys to run round fruit-trees, with lighted torches, singing these lines:

Taupes et mulots,
Sortez de vos clos,
Sinon vous brulerai et la barbe et les os.

[Moles and voles,
Get out of your holes,
Or else you will burn with your beard and your bones.]

* * *
From The Only True Mother Goose Melodies (Boston: J. S. Locke & Company, 1833), page 8:

Snail, Snail,
Come out of your hole,
Or else I'll beat you black as a coal.
Snail, Snail,
Put out your head,
Or else I'll beat you till you're dead.

* * *
From English Folk-Rhymes by G. F. Northall (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1892), page 326:

Snails.

In Warwickshire and Staffordshire they say—

"Snail, snail, put out your horn,
And I will give you a barleycorn."

In Sussex the rhyme is the same, but the dialect word for snail is "Snag."

In the East Riding the couplet is very similar—

Sneel, sneel, etc.,
Yer fayther an mother'll gie ya some corn.

In West Somerset the verse is of four lines and rather different in character—

"Snarley-'orn, put out your corn,
Father and mother's dead;
Zister 'n brither's out to back door,
Bakin' o' barley bread."

They then throw a great stone to crush the poor creature.

"Eating o' barley bread," is the last line in Essex.

Mr. Henderson, in his Folklore of the Northern Counties, p. 25, gives several examples—

"Snail, snail, etc.,
Or I'll kill your father and mother the morn."

The northern version, he says, is—

"Snail, snail, etc.,
Tell me what's the day t' morn,
To day's the morn to shear the corn,
Blaw bill buck thorn."

He also gives, as more common in the south, the couplet already quoted from Gammer Gurton's Garland, substituting, however, "beat" for "make"; and adds a Devonshire version similar to the West Somerset rhyme—

Snail, snail, shoot out your horn,
Father and mother are dead;
Brother and sister are in the backyard,
Begging for barley bread.

A variant from Yorkshire is—

"Sneel, snaul,
Robbers are coming to pull down your wall.
Sneel, snaul, put out, etc.
Robbers are coming to steal your corn,
Coming at four o'clock in the morn."

The snail is called Odmandod, Odmadod, or Dodman, in Essex and Suffolk. The rhyme in the last county is—

"Dodman, dodman, put out your horn,
Here comes a thief to steal your corn."

And there is this play upon the word amongst children, "I've killed a man!" "What sort of man?" "A Dodman."

Hodman-dodman and Hod-Dod are terms for the snail given in Wheatley's Dictionary of Rhyming Words, published in Transactions of the Philological Society for 1866.

The frequent reference to grain in these rhymes is singular. The creatures are very fond of meal, etc.; in fact they are often trapped in large numbers under a cabbage-leaf placed over a small quantity of bran on which they gather.

A friend suggests that the reference may be owing to a play upon "corn" and "horn," these words having a common etymon, as previously suggested in the notes to Harvest Customs.

* * *
From Negro Folk Rhymes by Thomas W. Talley (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), page 170:

THE SNAIL'S REPLY

Snail! Snail! Come out'n o' yo' shell,
Or I'll beat on yo' back till you rings lak a bell.

"I do ve'y well," sayed de snail in de shell,
"I'll jes take my chances in here whar I dwell."