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
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