Confirmation that Jacks are Flour Boys -- plus letting flies out

Here's a bit of sync evidence to support identifying "The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys." What does the giant say in Jack and the Beanstalk?

Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman;

Be he alive or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

In other words, the giant intends to use Jack's bones to make flour, making Jack a "Flour Boy" in the most literal possible sense.

One often runs into the variant "I'll have his bones to grind my bread," making Jack's bones the pestle rather than the flour. That makes a lot less sense, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure that the Flour Boy version was the original. I tracked down the earliest recorded version of the tale, in the 1734 edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire, and found the giant's chant on p. 45.

So yes, "I'll grind his bones to make my bread" is the original. But check out how the paragraph immediately previous begins:

And now no sooner was the Fly let out of its Cage . . .

Talk about a crazy sync! I hadn't the faintest notion that any version of Jack and the Beanstalk involved flies being let out of cages, but just yesterday I posted about catching and releasing flies in "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited." Note in particular this comment:

I began thinking up other ways of making a boring couplet saying that Tinbad the Tailor did tailor stuff. The first possibility to come to mind (better a near-rhyme than a repeated syllable) was:

Tinbad the Tailor took it in

But had to let it out again.

I was thinking only in terms with of tailoring — Tinbad took in a garment when its owner lost weight but had to let it out again when the weight was regained — but I soon realized it could also be read in terms of catching flies. Tinbad traps flies but, unlike Jinbad, doesn’t keep them.

Not only did I write about releasing an imprisoned fly, I even used the very same language -- "let out" -- as the 1734 tale. I guess I'm going to have to read the whole thing and see what other surprises it has for me.