"The False Bride" also known as "I Once Loved a Lass" or "A Week Before Easter" is a British folk song. The age of the song is uncertain, but versions of it date at least as far back as the 1680s. Although widely believed to be a Scottish song, the earliest record of it is from Newcastle upon Tyne. The song's theme is of unrequited love. Ewan MacColl wrote in the notes to his 1956 album Classic Scots Ballads: "Songs of jilted and forsaken lovers are common enough in Scotland but, for the most part, they tend to be ironical rather than pathetic in feeling. 'There are plenty more fish in the sea' is the philosophy of our jilted heroes and heroines. In this curious little song, however, the jilted lover, after attending his ex-sweetheart's nuptials, just lies down and dies." A. L. Lloyd's album notes state: "A version of this sad, tender song was printed on a Newcastle broadsheet in the 1680s, but it may be more than three hundred years old. A feeble prettied version, called The False Nymph, was current in concert halls in the eighteenth century. But as often happens, the common people preserved the song in much finer form than fashionable folk had it. It seems to have lasted best in the South, for several sets have turned up in Somerset, Devon and Sussex." It appears in the Roud Index of Folk Songs as #154. It was printed in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. Cecil Sharp collected "The False Bride" in 1904 in Hambridge, Somerset. It was recorded by Ewan McColl, A.L. Lloyd, Bob Copper, Archie Fisher, Louis Killen, Pentangle and others. The tune was used for "Dancing at Whitsun" by Austin John Marshall and "Birmingham Sunday" by Richard Fariņa. I usually play this as a dulcimer medley with "Derwentwater's Farewell".