A separate post, for those who are interested:

I pursued all three outlaw leads, La Renaudie, Rinaldo Rinaldini, and Reynoldyn, much further than the final form of the paper would indicate. When it was being published in academic folklore's most august journal, I ran afoul of their rather strict length limit (who knew?) In the end, they were probably right to force me to cut, as the discussions of previous outlaws were all essentially digressions.

In brief:

I don't think the La Renaudie hypothesis is convincing, mainly because there isn't a shred of evidence for it except that someone once noticed the similarity of names--in particular, there are not (to my knowledge) any French songs about him, nor is he a particularly well-known figure. To Richard's "whether the possible mixed fear and joy over female sexual awakening indicates a prior song to which the outlaw, with his rejection of licentiousness, but his succumbing to temptation, came, or whether the outlaw was there first and the inherent contradiction in the sexual theme of the song came later," I can only say "you've lost me completely." I keep trying to read that sentence, but never have any idea by the end what it means!

Rinaldo Rinaldini is, I think, a more probable source, because the novel about him by Christian August Vulpius (what a great surname for this particular discussion!) was very popular in German and in English translation almost exactly when the ballad "The Mountains High" arose. But it's almost too exact--if I recall, the first broadside we can date is the same year as the English translation of Rinaldo. If the song existed at all before that, it would be an impossible influence...besides which, the ballad bears no resemblance I could find to any particular incident in the novel (which I had to soldier through just to find that out!)

Reynoldyn, or Reynold, is, I think, the most likely outlaw source, and I have a separate paper coming out on that connection, very shortly, in a book from the University of Delaware Press. Essentially, this Reynold was a peripheral figure in the Robin Hood tales from before the date of the earliest ballads, and the first recorded form of his name (in 1432) is "Reynoldyn." In a later song, which Child prints in his notes but does not assign a number, "Renold" appears to be the real name of Much the Miller's son (although in the 1432 inscription, they are different outlaws.) However, even though I spun it into a separate paper, I am not truly convinced that there is a connection--I am just presenting it as a possibility.