This curious song, with its barely concealed but convoluted erotic metaphor, is actually quite rare, even though it was printed as a broadside.  A Dorset version collected by Hammond gives the title as “The Cluster of Nuts”.  The humour is that the farmer takes Jack’s description of the bet being about a total number of nuts and does not understand that it is really about the number of times that Jack had sex with the farmer’s wife.  Obviously the singer expected the audience to ‘get it’ or else the song would have little impact.

Notes by Gwilym Davies 17 March 2016