Love song about murder:

“Love Song about Murder” is the story of a resourceful woman who agrees to plead for the life of a rich nobleman who then marries her after his pardon. It was registered in 1594 as “A most sweete songe of an English merchant that killed a man in Guidine and was for the same judged to lose his head and howe in th ende a mayden saved his lyfe by T[homas] Deloney.” Other early titles include “The Merchant,” “The Rich Merchantman,” and other similar titles. Thomas Deloney (ca. 1543-ca. 1600) was a ballad writer and pamphleteer who wrote with considerable humor, portraying the life of the lower and middle classes in Elizabethan times (Simpson 602-4).

The song was also printed in the 1830s on a broadside by Leonard Deming, and survived in tradition, collected in New York state with the odd title “The Dens of Ireland” (“American Broadsides” 1:4360; Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 225-26; Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Notes 47).