every man Jack/mother’s son

Everyone without exception. The first term has been traced to Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and has remained largely British. The second is considerably older, appearing in the Middle English legend of Kyng Alisaunder (c. 1300)—“Mekely ilka modir sound”—as well as in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596)—“That would hang us, every mother’s son.” It was surely a cliché by the time Gilbert and Sullivan had the Dra- goons sing, “The soldiers of our Queen are linked in friendly tether, Upon the battle scene they fight the foe together, There every mother’s son pre- pared to fight and fall is; the enemy of one the enemy of all is” (Patience, 1881).