"The Maid Freed from the Gallows" is one of many titles of a centuries-old folk song about a condemned maiden pleading for someone to buy her freedom from the executioner.

A maiden (a young unmarried woman) or man is about to be hanged (in many variants, for unknown reasons) pleads with the hangman, or judge, to wait for the arrival of someone who may bribe him.

Such an interpretation would explain why a number of the song's variations have the condemned person asking whether the visitors have brought gold or paid the fee.

[8] In the early 1900s, Cecil Sharp collected many versions throughout England, from Yorkshire to Somerset, and his notes and transcriptions are available via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website.

The English version of the song tends to be called "The Prickle Holly Bush", several recordings of which were made around the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the south of England.

[21] An unusual version sung by Mrs. Lena Bare Turbyfill of Elk Park, North Carolina was collected by Herbert Halpert in 1939 as part of a WPA project.

[23] Francis James Child called the English language version "defective and distorted", in that, in most cases, the narrative rationale had been lost and only the ransoming sequence remained.

[24] Of the texts he prints, one (95F) had "degenerated" into a children's game, while others had survived as part of a Northern English cante-fable, The Golden Ball (or Key).

[25] Other fairy tales in the English language, telling the story more fully, always retell some variant on the heroine's being hanged for losing an object of gold.

[26] Folksinger Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, who also popularized such songs as "Cotton Fields" and "Midnight Special", first recorded "The Gallis Pole" in the 1930s accompanied by his own twelve-string guitar.

His haunting, shrill tenor delivers the lyrical counterpoint, and his story is punctuated with spoken-word passages, as he "interrupts his song to discourse on its theme".

Judy Collins performed the song "Anathea" throughout 1963 (including a rendition at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival), credited to Neil Roth and Lydia Wood.

7: Fair Game and Foul (1961), and subsequently by Shirley Collins, Trees, The Bothy Band, Cara Dillon, Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, June Tabor, Peter Bellamy and Spiers & Boden.

The album is a shift in style for the band towards acoustic material, influenced by a holiday Jimmy Page and Robert Plant took to the Bron-Yr-Aur cottage in the Welsh countryside.

Page adapted the song from a version by American folk musician Fred Gerlach,[34][35] which is included on his 1962 album Twelve-String Guitar for Folkways Records.

English folk group The Watersons recorded a version called "The Prickle-Holly Bush," with Martin Carthy singing lead, for their 1981 album Green Fields.

[40] The song is also found in Northern Sami, titled Nieida Kajon sis, which tells a story that strongly resembles the Lithuanian version.

The maid asks her relatives (father, mother, brother, sister, and uncle) to ransom her with their best belongings or animals (horse, cow, sword, crown, and ship).

[41] Francis James Child describes additional examples from the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Russia, and Slovenia, several of which feature a man being ransomed by a woman.

[24] The theme of delaying one's execution while awaiting rescue by relatives appears with a similar structure in the 1697 classic fairy tale "Bluebeard" by Charles Perrault[42] (translated into English in 1729).