Mr Red wrote: I just happened on a video explaining/translating the "original" (?)

It would be interesting to hear the comments of scholars on the assertion, that Victorians shied away from the song because it contained one word few people would bother too much about, in a song at least.

I frankly didn't listen to the end of the video. Who is this guy, and didn't he take a college English course? We had a big section on early English lyrics in my college lit class.

The claim that it's the earliest English song goes back at least to Ritson. There are a number of complications, though. For starters, it's in a book of lyrics, the "Harley Lyrics," and though the others don't have melodies, many are clearly songs. And it looks as if the arrangement of the tune, at least, was fiddled with by the scribe.

And, yes, the song gets bowdlerized a lot. Or merely mis-translated. I have a girl scout songbook which has the song, suitably cleaned up!

Odds are, unless you look at a fairly scholarly transcription, both text and tune have been modernized -- the original text is old enough that it still uses thorn for th.

Also, the date is paleographic -- based on the handwriting, not a hard date. The most common date is 1225-1250, but there are scholars who argue fourteenth century. Even the scribe is not quite certain.

I won't go on; most of this is reprising what I wrote in the Ballad Index entry. That's at https://balladindex.org/Ballads/FSWB260B.html.