Looking back at my comments in the other thread referred to (Riddle Song - bird without a gall?), they don't seem so very unreasonable: as I hoped I had made plain, they were intended not to give offense but to elicit pertinent information, which I would have been interested in, having a minor background in medieval studies (though only at undergraduate level, and I'm afraid that I avoided linguistics at the time, which is a pity).

My flippant remark early in this discussion was regrettable, however, and I apologise for causing upset (and inadvertently diverting the thread from its intended purpose). Tansy must do as she thinks fit, but it would be a shame if she were to allow a minor disagreement of this sort to discourage her from participating here, as I'm sure she has a great deal to offer the Forum as well as (like all of us) to learn from it.

I am sometimes rather intense about all this; I have a passion for the music and all that is associated with it, of the kind that others reserve for sports or politics. That intensity can certainly be mistaken by some people in some circumstances for rudeness, and perhaps I should cultivate a more relaxed and conversational tone. The trouble is that there is so much to do and to learn, and so little time to fit it all into.

Although it was kind of John to bracket me with the late Bruce Olson, the truth is that I will never know half as much as he did (and, of course, there are not a few other people who have been regulars here over the years who also far surpass what I can contribute). I have tried to fill, in a small way, the gap that Bruce left here; but it's not the same: though of course he and I did have in common the fact that we can sometimes appear difficult as internet correspondents, while being really quite easy to get on with in "real life".

Enough of all that. It is time to return to the matter in hand; or at least to one aspect of it. An antecedent of Old MacDonald appeared in D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719, II, 214) as A Song in the Opera call'd, The Kingdom of the Birds (from Thomas D'Urfey and William Worthen Appleton, Wonders in the sun; or, The kingdom of the birds: London, 1706). It's quoted in the thread Up was I on my father's farm.

1706 isn't particularly old, of course (though the bulk of the songs in English that we think of as "folk songs" are probably more recent); but older than a lot of people would think for a song like that. It isn't impossible that D'Urfey and Appleton based it on an existing song, but if they did I don't think we have a record of it.