"John Barleycorn" is an English and Scottish folk song listed as number 164 in the Roud Folk Song Index. John Barleycorn, the song's protagonist, is a personification of barley and of the alcoholic beverages made from it: beer and whisky. In the song, he suffers indignities, attacks, and death that correspond to the various stages of barley cultivation, such as reaping and malting. The song may have its origins in ancient English or Scottish folklore, with written evidence of the song dating it at least as far back as the Elizabethan era. The oldest versions are Scottish and include the Scots poem "Quhy Sowld Nocht Allane Honorit Be". In 1782, the Scottish poet Robert Burns published his own version of the song, which influenced subsequent versions. The song survived into the twentieth century in the oral folk tradition, primarily in England, and many popular folk revival artists have recorded versions of the song. In most traditional versions, including the sixteenth century Scottish version entitled Alan-a-Maut, the plant's ill-treatment by humans and its re-emergence as beer to take its revenge are key themes. History Possible ancient origins In their notes to the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (London, 1959), editors A. L. Lloyd and Ralph Vaughan Williams ponder whether the ballad is "an unusually coherent folklore survival" or "the creation of an antiquarian revivalist, which has passed into popular currency and become 'folklorised. It has been theorised that the figure could have some relation to the semi-mythical wicker man ritual, which involves burning a man in effigy. Kathleen Herbert draws a link between the mythical figure Beowa (a figure stemming from Anglo-Saxon paganism that appears in early Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies whose name means "barley") and the figure of John Barleycorn. Herbert says that Beowa and Barleycorn are one and the same, noting that the folksong details the suffering, death, and resurrection of Barleycorn, yet also celebrates the "reviving effects of drinking his blood". Written versions The first song to personify Barley was called Allan-a-Maut ('Alan of the malt'), a Scottish song written prior to 1568; Allan is also the subject of "Quhy Sowld Nocht Allane Honorit Be", a fifteenth or sixteenth century Scots poem included in the Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568 and 17th century English broadsides. "A Pleasant New Ballad" (1624) The first mention of "John Barleycorn" as the character was in a 1624 London broadside entitled introduced as "A