Jack and Jill go up a hill for water, Jack falls and cracks his crown, Jill tumbles after him, and Jack is patched up with vinegar and brown paper by Dame Dob. It has a beginning, an accident, and a fix, which makes it a proper little story rather than just a jingle, and the tumbling rhythm mimics the fall itself. A good one for acting out the climb and the topple with your hands.
Sung or chanted; it tumbles downhill in the second line, so let it.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down, and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
Then up Jack got and off did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.
About this poem
First printed in the 1760s
First printed in the 1760s, in one of the early Mother Goose collections. Nobody knows who Jack and Jill were, or why they went up a hill for water, which usually sits at the bottom of one. People have read all sorts into it since: a satire on a king's tax, a beheading, a village scandal in Somerset. None of it has any evidence behind it. These are guesses, pinned on long after the rhyme was already being sung.
Good for a bump. When a child takes a small tumble, this is the rhyme that turns it into a story instead of a drama. Dame Dob and her vinegar and brown paper are worth pointing at: that is how people once dressed a bruise, long before plasters. Say it slowly and the fall stops being frightening.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition