"The False Knight Upon the Road", also known as "The Fause Knight Upon the Road" is a British ballad, collected and published as Child ballad #3. It is in the Roud Folk Song Index as #20. It features a riddling exchange between a schoolboy and a "false knight", the devil in disguise. The melody is the one collected from Mrs. Jane Gentry in Hot Springs, North Carolina on September 12th, 1916. It was recorded by Norman Kennedy (as "The Fause Knight Upon the Road") on Ballads & Songs of Scotland (1968), Tim Hart and Maddy Prior on Summer Solstice (1971) and Steeleye Span on Please to See the King (1971). Tim Hart and Maddy Prior's version of the ballad comes quite indirectly from the singing of Maud Long, whose mother, Jane Gentry, was one of the singers from whom Cecil Sharp gathered songs in North Carolina in 1916. It is considerably modified from the version recorded for the Library of Congress in 1947 by Maud Long. Two other versions are available by Joe Hickerson and Betty Smith. It was printed in Niles' The Ballad Book (1960) and Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917).