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"Scarborough Fair" (Child 2, Roud 12) is a traditional English ballad. The song, which is a variant of The Elfin Knight, lists a number of impossible tasks given to a former lover who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The "Scarborough Fair" variant was most common in the North and Northeast of England, where it was sung to various melodies, with refrains resembling "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" and "Then she'll be a true love of mine".
The famous melody, which uses the Dorian mode (typical of the middle English period), was collected from Mark Anderson (1874 -1953), a retired lead-miner from Middleton-in-Teesdale, County Durham, England, by Ewan MacColl in 1947. This version was recorded by a number of musicians in the twentieth century, including the version by the 1960s folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel who learned it from Martin Carthy.
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