The Bramble Briar
traditional English folk murder ballad
"The Bramble Briar", "The Merchant's Daughter" or "In Bruton Town" (Roud 18; Laws M32) is a traditional English folk murder ballad that tells the story of how two brothers murder a servant who is courting their sister. There are many versions of the song going by a number of different titles.
Synopsis
A girl of noble birth falls in love with a servant and the two agree to get married. However, her two brothers discover the tryst and, because they consider him too low-born for her, decide to murder him. They go out hunting in the woods early in the morning and take the servant along with them. One of the brothers kills the man and hides the body in a bramble thicket. Once back home, their sister asks them why they are whispering to each other and what has become of the servant. One of the brothers tells her that they have lost him somewhere that he will never be found. That night the girl dreams of her lover. He is dead and covered in blood.
“The Bramble Briar” enters the record as traditional English folk murder ballad. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bramble, Briar and traditional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 3, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7719829. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Bramble Briar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.