SONGS FROM THE BALCONY
The earliest version of The Begging Song, or A-Begging I Will Go, was printed on a black-letter broadside (a handbill, a proclamations or an advertisement ordinarily printed on one side only) in 1684, and used in a ballad opera, A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars. Versions survived in oral tradition for almost three hundred years in England and, especially, in Scotland.