Thought to date to the few years after the Napoleonic War Ian. There was a series of bad harvests from 1816 which ruined a lot of farmers, and wide-spread unemployment and economic depression. The ruling and middle classes were still in the grip of anti-Jacobin hysteria which was most apparent in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. I never sing the song without thinking of an ancestor of mine of the 1820s who was a tradesman who travelled alone, in his case a shoemaker who knocked together cheap shoes in an attic with his young family and then wandered the streets trying to flog them.