The Painful Plough
Speed the Plough track 11
This song is included in the New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, so by definition it is a song which has ben frequently collected from tradition. The notes in that volume tell us that the earliest known version is an eight-page chapbook titled The Ploughman's Garland, printed at Darlington in 1774 (and now held in the Bodleian). Our words are based on those collected by Cecil Sharp from Thomas Mitchell, Merriott, Somerset in 1903, and printed in Folk Songs from Somerset - although I believe we may have had them from the Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse.
As Cecil Sharp notes 'The adjective "painful" is of course, used in its original sense of taking pains, careful, industrious'.