This Is the House That Jack Built was printed in numerous collections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Randolph Caldecott produced an illustrated version in 1878. Cherrington Manor, a handsome timber-framed house in North East Shropshire, England, is reputed to be the actual house that Jack built. There is a former malt house in the grounds. Each sentence in the story is an example of an increasingly deeply nested relative clause. The last version, "This is the horse...", would be quite difficult to untangle if the previous ones were not present. See the Noun Phrase for more details about postmodification of the noun phrase in
Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme) and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. Jack is the most common name used in English-language nursery rhymes and represented an archetypal Everyman hero by the 18th century, while Jill or Gill had come to mean a young girl or a sweetheart by the end of the Middle Ages. However, the woodcut that accompanied the first recorded version of the rhyme showed two boys (not a boy and a girl) and used the spelling Gill not Jill. The true origin of the rhyme is unknown, but there are several