When the Master Thief comes to claim his reward, the squire asks him to prove his skill further by playing a trick on the priest.

He drags the priest over stones and thorns and throws him into the goose-house, telling him it is purgatory, and then steals all his treasure.

The Master Thief makes a dummy with the appearance of a man, and when he puts it at the window, the squire shoots it, and the boy lets it drop.

[6] Folklorist Stith Thompson argued the story can be found in tale collections from Europe, Asia, and all over the world.

[9] A scholarly inquiry by Italian Istituto centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi ("Central Institute of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage"), produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, found the existence of variants and subtypes of the tale across Italian sources, grouped under the name Mastro Ladro.

[10] Folklorist Joseph Jacobs wrote a reconstruction of the tale, with the same name, in his Europa's Fairy Book, following a formula he specified in his commentaries.

[11] An earlier literary variant is Cassandrino, The Master-Thief, appearing in Straparola's collection The Facetious Nights.

The squire gives the boy the tasks of stealing the horses from the stable, the sheet, his wife's wedding ring, and the parson and clerk from the church as tests of skill and threatens that upon failure, he would hang him.

[13][14] The Apprentice Thief, an Irish variant, was published anonymously in the compilation The Royal Hibernian Tales.

[19] German scholar Johann Georg von Hahn compared 6 variants he collected in Greece to the tale in the Brothers Grimm's compilation.

"[22] The motif of impossible thievery can be found in a story engraved in a Babylonian tablet in the tale Poor Man of Nippur.

[26] Northern India folklore attests to the presence of two variants of the tale involving a king's son as the "Master-Thief".

[27] Ralph Steele Boggs, following Johannes Bolte and Jiri Polívka's Anmerkungen (1913),[28] listed Spanish picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) as a predecessor of the tale-type.

[29] Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons collected variants of the tale in Caribbean countries.