I very much doubt it, Richie. The ballad writers weren't exactly brilliant poets. Nor did they need to be. These things were sold on the streets remember. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the line
'And in the town of Wittham then'. These things were run off with not a great deal of thought and time spent on them, and scanning to make them fit a tune was more important than poetic niceties.

Spending a day looking at the syntax and sentence construction in broadside pieces you would come across much that was at the very least awkward and not everyday language. Some of the sophisticated ballad forgers actually included this to make their forgeries look more authentic.

Wittham is only a few miles from Oxford and this is the earliest, longest version by far. Why are you still looking at derivatives?