ABSTRACT
The text presented here lacks certain important features found in most of the longer versions of the story, which runs thus: The daughter of a lord/rich man/merchant/farmer is in love with a servant/sailor/ploughboy/apprentice-boy. Her brothers, determined that her dowry will not fall into the hands of a social inferior – or merely incensed by the young man’s presumptuousness in aspiring to the hand of their sister – conspire to murder him. Having persuaded him to accompany them on a hunting trip, they lure him to a secluded spot – a brake of briars/bamboo briars/a patch of briars/bramble briars/a lonesome desert/a place of woe-and there they murder him.
