The Nut-Brown Maid

[3] The literary scholar, Walter Skeat suggested the ballad was "almost certainly written by a woman" based on internal references and the poem's vigorous defence of the constancy of women.

[6] In 1537 John Scott published a religious song called 'The New Nut Brown Maid' which employed the same phraseology and the same stanza form of the original, in which the dialogue is now between the Virgin and Christ.

[9] After falling into obscurity during the Stuart Period, 'The Nut-Brown Maid' became better known again in the eighteenth century and was reprinted many times.

He warns her that men will slander her for it, that she will have to take a bow as if a man, that if he is caught and executed, no one will help her, that the way will be hard, in the wild and exposed to weather, that meals will be scarce and beds non-existent, that she will have to disguise herself as a man, that he believes she will give it up quickly, that being a baron's daughter and he a lowly squire, she will come to curse him for this, and that he might fall in love with another woman, but to each one, she retorts that she will still come, because she loves him alone.

The enormous popularity of Prior's poem in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries stimulated interest in "The Nut-Brown Maid", on which it was based.

[14] Ursula March is referred to several times, in Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), as the "Nut-browne Mayde," highlighting her status as a faithful woman who marries beneath her station.