Since the old thread is back, I might add a little more information that I didn't have five years ago.

Martin Carthy's recording was an arrangement of the set noted by W P Merrick in November 1900 from the retired farmer and prolific singer Henry Hills, who was fairly sure that he had learned it in his youth at Lodsworth, Sussex, but didn't recall from whom. The song was printed, with some 50-odd others from Mr Hills, in The Journal of the Folk-Song Society, vol I, issue 3, 1901, p 135 (Bruce Olson referred to it earlier on).

Martin made some minor changes to the wording; oddly enough, the verse I originally forgot to quote seems to have been introduced from elsewhere; Mr Hills didn't sing it.

Number 300 in the Roud Folk Song Index, as Bruce mentioned. Examples currently listed are mostly from Southern England together with broadside issues; though there is one reference to an Irish broadside edition, localised as The Newry Transport. I gather that there is useful information in Hugh Anderson's Farewell to Judges and Juries: The Broadside Ballad and Convict Transportation to Australia 1788-1868 (Victoria: Red Rooster, 2000). Bob Bolton would be the man to comment on that, I should think.