Origins
Scholar Kathleen Herbert draws a link between Beowa (a mythical 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."
Barleycorn, the personification of the barley, encounters great suffering before succumbing to an unpleasant death. However, as a result of this death alcohol can be produced; therefore, Barleycorn dies so that others may live. Finally his body will be drunk as the alcohol. A popular hymn, "We Plough the Fields and Scatter", is often sung at Harvest Festival to the same tune.
On the other hand, 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 'folklorized'". It is in any case, they note, "an old song", with printed versions dating as far back as the sixteenth century.
Read more about this topic: John Barleycorn
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