The Maid and the Palmer

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Child's Ballads/21

"The Maid and the Palmer" (a.k.a. "The Maid of Coldingham" and "The Well Below The Valley") (Roud 2335, Child ballad 21) is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics (implying murder and, in some versions, incest), the song was often avoided by folk singers.^[1] Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly,^[2] from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time.^[3] Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings,^[4] this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.^[5]