Cecil Sharp's Note 28 (1916)

No. 28. Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor

This, of course, is a very common ballad. The words are on ballad-sheets and in most of the well-known collections, and are fully analyzed in Child’s English and Scottish Ballads. For versions with tunes, see the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume ii, pp.105–108); English County Songs (p. 42); Sandys’s Christmas Carols; Traditional Tunes (p. 40); Ritson’s Scottish Songs (Part iv, p. 228); etc.

The singer assured me that the three lines between the twentieth and twenty-first stanzas were always spoken and never sung. This is the only instance of the kind that I have come across (see English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 6).