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
The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late from 1923, also subsequently included in "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil") as typical examples of Tolkien's working strategy for reconstructing philological information about sources now lost. In this case the question is: what lies behind the abbreviated version of this poem that survives as a well-known but nonsensical nursery rhyme? By imagining a text that might reasonably have left the surviving rhyme, one can deduce clues that might have left other artifacts in surviving literature. Shippey argues that many of the scenarios in Tolkien's more serious work are similar recreations ("'asterisk' poems" in Shippey's phrase), attempting to explain abstruse passages