"The Nut-Brown Maid", also known as "The Nut-Brown Maiden", is a ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

 included by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...

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Synopsis

A man and woman talk of women's fidelity, he disbelieving, and she producing the nut-brown maid as proof. They discuss her story. Her love comes to her, a knight but banished. She tells him that she loves him alone. He tells her that he must go to the greenwood, and she says that it grieves her. He asks if she would not find time easing her and urges her to let it, and she declares that she would go with him to the woods. He warns her that men will slander her for it, that she will have to take a bow as if a man, that if he is caught and executed, no one will help her, that the way will be hard, in the wild and exposed to weather, that meals will be scarce and beds non-existent, that she will have to disguise herself as a man, that he believes she will give it up quickly, that being a baron's daughter and he a lowly squire, she will come to curse him for this, and that he might fall in love with another woman, but to each one, she retorts that she will still come, because she loves him alone.

He tells her that he is not, after all, banished, and she says she is glad but knows that men are fickle. The man assures her that he will marry her, and that he is, in fact, an Earl's son.

See also

• The New-Slain Knight
  The New-Slain Knight
  -Synopsis:A man tells a woman that he has seen a knight murdered outside her father's garden. She insists on a description and laments that she has no father for her baby. He offers to take her love's place, and she refuses. He pulls off his disguise and reveals himself as her love, and assures...
  
  
• The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington
  The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington
  -Synopsis:A esquire's son fell in love with a bailiff's daughter. She would not believe him in love, and his family had him apprenticed for seven years when they discovered it. He believed that she did not think of him the whole time....
  
  
• The West Country Damosel's Complaint
  The West Country Damosel's Complaint
  -Synopsis:The heroine demands of William that he will marry her or kill her. He warns her that living with him in the wild will be very hard. She comes, but after three months has enough of cold and hunger and goes to her sister, begging for alms. Her sister calls up her huntsman and has them...
  
  

External links

• The Nut-Brown Maid