There's a version by (Thomas?) Barham, in the Ingoldsby Legends, which he sets in an area known as the Bayle, in Folkestone, Kent, England, and I believe I have seen another in which the magician is Friar Bacon, at Oxford, or else Friar Bungay. I have seen an African story teller on TV tell a version from West Africa.

The Bayle setting is interesting because the first settlement there, a convent, had its prayer times disturbed because the nuns had to spend so much time going up and down the hill to the stream to fetch water. The young Jutish Abbess arranged for an aqueduct to be dug to bring water from a spring about 3 miles away. Or arranged a miraculous flow as I was told, aged 7. It still provided water until the founding of the local water company in Victorian times, so would have been known to Barham. I don't know if this would have influenced his setting the story there, or whether it indicates his attitude to young women entering the career or water engineering....

Penny