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 that may have inspired the form, the lyrics bear little relationship. It was suggested by James Orchard Halliwell that the reference to the "priest all shaven and shorn" indicates that the English version is probably very old, presumably as far back as the mid-sixteenth century. There is a possible reference to the song in "The Boston New Letter" of 12 April 1739 and the line: "This is the man all forlorn, &c". However, it did not appear in print until it was included in "Nurse Truelove's New-Year's-Gift, or the Book of Books for Children", printed in London in 1755. It