" This ballad is one of those quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1611), and it was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1630. The Gosson broadside [81C] printed by Child is little later, the Percy Folio text [81B] is of about the same date, and the A-text is of 1658. There has also survived a Scottish text earlier than any of these in the Panmure MS., as yet unprinted. None of these early texts, so far as I have learned, either preserves or names a tune. They are in ordinary ballad-quatrains, single or double, and without refrain; except that the A-text has an interpolated "Hay downe" after the first line. In this feature it is like the scrap quoted in The Knight, except that the latter has an extra "down". These may probably be an abbreviated indication of a fuller refrain such as is found at the same place in several of the Robin Hood ballads. Some of the latter add a similar indication after the fourth line. One may conjecture that the refrain as actually sung in these cases was of the Three Ravens pattern, appearing as the second, fourth, and seventh and eighth phrases of an eight-phrase tune. This is a normal form for country dances in the seventeenth century; and ballad-tunes adapted to dancing, usually in 6/8 time, were likely to be so extended. On the other hand, the tune of Arthur-a-Bland, used with some of the Robin Hood ballads, had only this single interpolated phrase after the second line and may be the one here intended."

"The earliest tunes actually reported from tradition are of a far later date, being Motherwell's of 1827 [Child 81M, Little Mushiegrove] and Chappell's of c.1858. (Rimbault, in 1850, follows Motherwell with editorial alteration.) These are both variants of the same tune."