Hi Jim,
Happy New Year.
I don't doubt what you say. The Percy text has often been reprinted, notably in the 1910 widely disseminated Oxford Book of Ballads. I shall in due course be looking in great detail at all versions of the ballad, but for the moment it looks to me like a concocted text with bits garbled and bits added in from other songs. Oral tradition? Possibly but with some doctoring from someone with access to a print copy IMHO, and at first inspection.

Steve the skeptic