This Is the House That Jack Built This Is the House That Jack Built "This Is the House That Jack Built" is a popular British nursery rhyme and cumulative tale. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20584. It is Aarne–Thompson type 2035. This is perhaps the most common set of modern lyrics: Some versions use "cheese" instead of "malt", "priest" instead of "judge", "cock" instead of "rooster", the older past tense form "crew" instead of "crowed", or "chased" in place of "killed". Also in some versions the horse, the hound, and the horn are left out and the rhyme ends with the farmer. It
Nursery rhyme been argued to have hidden meanings and origins. John Bellenden Ker (1765?–1842), for example, wrote four volumes arguing that English nursery rhymes were actually written in 'Low Saxon', a hypothetical early form of Dutch. He then 'translated' them back into English, revealing in particular a strong tendency to anti-clericalism. Many of the ideas about the links between rhymes and historical persons, or events, can be traced back to Katherine Elwes's book "The Real Personages of Mother Goose" (1930), in which she linked famous nursery-rhyme characters with real people, on little or no evidence. She assumed that children's songs were a