A little way back in this thread Steve Gardham said (typos corrected) "As far as I know the cock crowing is simply heralding the day when all ghosts must return to the grave, so the cock has no real supernatural significance in itself ..."

Or perhaps it does have. Paul Davenport provides this info:

"A small votive cockerel was recently (within the last ten years) discovered in a dig on a Roman site in York. The bronze effigy had traces of both silver and gold details. The pig and the cock are both animals sacred to Hermes/Mercury in his role as psychopomp, that is guide of the dead.

"Now one could argue that this merely means the song was written by someone who had seen one of these objects or…more excitingly, it means that the song carries forward a folk-belief in the potency of the cock as herald of the dawn. The druids had a riddle (I believe) 'Who councils the place where couches the sun? Who knows where the darkness and the dawn divide?' The answer is of course the cockerel. Its importance lies in the notion of liminality where, being in two states at one time creates the instability in which magic takes place."

While the grey cock could be just an ordinary cock about to do his thing of announcing the dawn, the offer to endow him with gold wings and silver comb (or, as I would prefer, vice versa) could be a reference to such votive offerings and an acknowledgment of his role in escorting the dead lover's soul to the afterlife. It makes little sense otherwise: one can hardly see an ordinary cock fitted with metallic prostheses. Sometimes the offer to the cock is instead a cage of gold, but that likewise makes little sense: why should he accept being caged at all?

Richard