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
This Is the House That Jack Built is a cumulative tale that does not tell the story of Jack's house, or even of Jack who built the house, but instead shows how the house is indirectly linked to other things and people, and through this method tells the story of "The man all tattered and torn", and the "Maiden all forlorn", as well as other smaller events, showing how these are interlinked. It has been argued that the rhyme is derived from an Aramaic (Jewish) hymn "Chad Gadya" ("lit.", "One Young Goat") in "Sepher Haggadah", first printed in 1590; but although this is an early cumulative tale