... but not very different from Kidson if you quote a bit more from A.L.Lloyd's Yorkshire Garland sleeve notes: More than a hundred years ago this song was being spoken of as “a favourite with the peasantry in every part of England but more particularly in the mining districts of the North”. A soap-boiler and vitriol manufacturer, Thomas Doubleday (who was also a fine pioneer folk song collector) heard it sung by a street ballad singer in Newcastle and he sent a copy to Blackwood's Magazine, who published it in 1821. Every version found since then is so close to Doubleday's, that it looks as if the song's early appearance in print quite fixed its form for ever. Frank Kidson noted a version from his mother “who heard it sung in Leeds about the year 1820”, but it's the Newcastle set, word for word, and note for note. More or less identical is this present version, an amplification of a set found in Yorkshire by Nigel and Mary Hudleston.
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