The two witness children who return to Hamelin to tell the tale speak of a better land and wishing to be with their friends, and the piper. The poem, and subsequent picture book pairing Greenaway’s illustrations with each stanza, presents an ending that is bittersweet.

Theories vary as to the truth of what might have happened in Hamelin, but widely accepted by historians is the theory the children were part of the Ostseidlung, the German term for colonization of Eastern Europe. The original event is commemorated as Ratcatcher’s (Rattenfänger) Day, July 22, 1387, but Joseph and Wilhem Grimm’s “Rattenfänger von Hamelin” in Deutsche Sagen (1816,1818) places the actual year of the loss of 130 of Hamelin’s children as 1284. Rats, and their removal by the piper, was added in the mid-fourteenth century, around the time the Plague or Black Death ravished Europe and rat catchers became common in medieval towns. The original account from 1284 did not include the rats, which are integral to the modern story. “Rats!/ They fought the dogs and killed the cats/ And bit the babies in the cradles/ And ate the cheeses out of the vats”(Browning 2.1,2,3,4). The townspeople memorialized the loss of the children in a stained-glass window of the church in Hamelin. Only two children who were taken returned as witnesses to the supposed abduction and reported that the piper led the children to a cave and through a tunnel to Transylvania. One hundred and thirty of the town’s children disappeared shortly after the arrival of a colorfully-dressed stranger or piper.

In the summer of 1284, a tragedy is said to have taken place in the German town of Hamelin. Historians believe that the folktale is based on a factual event in Lower Saxony, Germany. Greenaway's then-popular style of illustrating increased the poem's audience, and “Pay the Piper” entered the modern lexicon as an English idiom. In the late 19th Century, Robert Browning’s poem, the “Pied Piper of Hamelin: a child’s story” (1842), was adapted to a picture book and illustrated by Victorian children’s book illustrator, Kate Greenaway The picture book’s story is based on a German folktale from the Middle Ages with the moral of “keep your promises” the town does not keep its promise to the piper, and its parents suffer a disastrous result (Browning, 11.4).

The pied piper robert browning