Jack and Jill

Later the spelling was changed to Jill and more verses were added to carry the story further, of which the commonest are: Up Jack got and home did trot, As fast as he could caper; Went to bed to mend his head With vinegar and brown paper.

[8] Though approximately the words above are what have survived of the nursery rhyme to the present, their sense is preserved at the start of a 15-stanza chapbook, Jack & Jill and Old Dame Gill, published in 1806.

In this version the trio of Jack, Jill, and their mother Dame Gill experience further mishaps involving the dog Ball, an attack from a goat, falls from a see-saw, a swing and a pig, followed by a parental whipping for getting dirty.

[14] In the introduction to his work, Gobright makes the claim that the two-stanza version of the original nursery rhyme was, in earlier editions, followed by two more: Little Jane ran up the lane To hang her clothes a-drying; She called for Nell to ring the bell, For Jack and Jill were dying.

[16] Clifton Bingham (1859–1913) followed it with "The New Jack and Jill", which appeared in the children's album Fun and Frolic (London and New York, 1900), illustrated by Louis Wain.

A musical arrangement of the rhyme as a catch by Charles Burney was published in 1777, at a date earlier than any still existing copy of Mother Goose's Melody.

[20] And in 1877 the single-stanza version illustrated by Walter Crane appeared in The Baby's Opera (London 1877), which described itself as "a book of old rhymes in new dresses, the music by the earliest masters".

[21] The Victorian composer Alfred James Caldicott, who distinguished himself by setting several nursery rhymes as ingenious part songs, adapted "Jack and Jill" as one in 1878.

S. Baring-Gould suggested that the rhyme is related to a story in the 13th-century Icelandic Gylfaginning in which the brother and sister Hjuki and Bil were stolen by the Moon while drawing water from a well, to be seen there to this day.

[29] Other suggestions rooted in history include a reference to the executions of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley in 1510,[30] or to a marriage negotiation conducted by Thomas Wolsey in 1514.

[31] Alternatively it has been taken to satirise the attempt by King Charles I of England to raise extra revenue by ordering that the volume of a Jack (1/8 pint) be reduced, while the tax remained the same.

[33] A more prosaic origin of the rhyme is suggested by historian Edward A. Martin, who notes that pails of water may readily have been collected from dew ponds, which were located on the tops of hills.