" but it could also be down to the fact that such jobs were given to the lowest apprentices in the printers at the bottom of the market. "
And we'll never know - will we? But taking into consideration all the other songs following the same theme and using a similar form, it's far safer to assume common origins.
Of course, there may have been "the lowest apprentices in the printers at the bottom of the market", who experienced pregnancy, warfare and loss to the extent that they were able to express the effects as graphically as these songs communicate (certainly well enough for them to have survived for centuries), but one tends to think that the events depicted were drawn from real life - don'cha think?
This stuff is deathless verse; not the doggerel that you would expect from the imaginings of "hacks".
Jim Carroll