"The Broomfield Hill" is a traditional folk ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

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Synopsis

A man and a woman make a wager, that she can not visit him in the greenwood without losing her virginity, or she makes a tryst and realizes she can either stay and be foresworn, or go and lose her virginity. She goes, sometimes after advice from a witch-wife, and puts him in an enchanted sleep; then, leaving tokens that she had come and gone.

He wakes and taxes those with him—his goshawk, his servingmen, his horse, or his hound—that they did not wake him, but they answer it was impossible. He is angry that he did not manage to take her virginity and, in many variants, murder her afterward.

In some variants, she hears this and leaves glad.

Motifs

The woman who enchants a man to sleep and so preserves her virginity is a common folktale and ballad motif throughout Europe.