Certainly the most widely known folk song associated with Lincolnshire, the first printed version of which was published in York in 1776. In Folklore of Lincolnshire (2013), Susanna O’Neill notes that the song is ‘akin to the National Anthem for Lincolnshire’. It has given its name to several pubs in the county (and another in Nottingham), a very popular hard cheese made near Alford, the Poacher Line (the railway line from Grantham to Skegness via Sleaford and Boston), and a county magazine, among many other things, and its tune has long been used by BBC Radio Lincolnshire, in various iterations, as well as (allegedly) by the British Secret Intelligence Service, as the interval signal for a secretive shortwave numbers station (allegedly) broadcast from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, between the 1960s (initial broadcasting date unknown) and 2008. For more information on that, see this link. It was the theme song of the 1940 film Tom Brown’s School Days, and versions of the song have been recorded by numerous artists. For example, below:

Folk songs are often subversive, and this one is no exception: it tells the triumphant story of a band of poachers, and the last verse wishes ‘Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare, / Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.’ However, as Derek Turner points out in Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (2022), ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ has ‘made it into state-sponsored respectability, co-opted by the army as a quick march’, and the 2^nd Battalion of the Royal Anglican Regiment is known as ‘the Poachers’. King George IV is said to have been one of the song’s greatest admirers. The song (and the tale it tells) is not specific to any part of the country, and it is unknown who wrote it. There is a plaque commemorating the song, and the fate of one poacher who shot a gamekeeper and was hanged in 1877, in the grounds of Lincoln Castle, which also includes the former prison where many poachers were punished, and which you can visit.

Words by RORY WATERMAN