The story of the ballad was in all likelihood traditionally derived from the good old tale of the Wife Lapped in Morrel's Skin (Hazlitt's Early Popular Poetry, iv, 179). Here a husband, who has put up with a great deal from an excessively restive wife, flays his old horse Morrell and salts the hide, takes the shrew down cellar, and, after a sharp contest for mastery, beats her with birchen rods till she swoons, then wraps her in the salted hide: by which process the woman is perfectly reformed.
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