"The Maid Freed from the Gallows" is one of many titles of a centuries-old folk song about a condemned maiden pleading for someone to buy her freedom from the executioner. In the collection of ballads compiled by Francis James Child, it is indexed as Child Ballad number 95; eleven variants, some fragmentary, are indexed as 95A to 95K. The ballad existed in a number of folkloric variants from many different countries, and has been remade in a variety of formats. It was recorded in 1939 as "The Gallis Pole" by folk singer Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, but the most famous version was the 1970 cover of the Fred Gerlach version by English rock band Led Zeppelin, which was entitled "Gallows Pole" on the album Led Zeppelin III.

Led Zeppelin members Page and Plant later recorded a version of this song for their 1994 release No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded. They also released this track as a single. The song was performed regularly on the subsequent tour and featured a hurdy gurdy.

The song has also been recorded by numerous other artists, including Odetta, Great Big Sea, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Nic Jones, Almeda Riddle, Uriah Heep, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and Alvin Youngblood Hart. German folk metal band In Extremo has version of this song called "Der Galgen." Spiers and Boden recorded two variations: Derry Gaol and Prickle Eye Bush, the latter was also recorded with Bellowhead. Jasper Carrott performed a comedy version in which the narrator is hanged before he can finish the first verse. American folk singer John Jacob Niles also recorded a version under the title "The Hangman," the song was featured in the Harmony Korine film Mister Lonely.

A few lines of the song are sung by a woman strumming a guitar in a 1949 John Wayne movie, "The Fighting Kentuckian." The song is chronologically appropriate to the film, which is set in 1818.

The song likely originated in a language other than English. Some fifty versions have been reported in Finland, where it is well known as Lunastettava neito. It is titled Den Bortsålda in Sweden, and Die Losgekaufte in German. A Lithuanian version has the maid asking relatives to ransom her with their best animals or belongings (sword, house, crown, ring etc.). The maiden curses her relatives who refuse to give up their property, and blesses her fiancé, who does ransom her.

Francis James Child found the English version "defective and distorted," in that, in most cases, the narrative rationale had been lost and only the ransoming sequence remained. Numerous European variants explain the reason for the ransom: the heroine has been captured by pirates. Of the texts he prints, one (95F) had "degenerated" into a children's game, while others had survived as part of a Northern English cante-fable, The Golden Ball (or Key).

Child describes additional examples from Färöe, Iceland, Russia, and Slovenia. Several of these feature a man being ransomed by a woman.

The theme of delaying one's execution while awaiting rescue by relatives appears with a similar structure in the classic fairy tale "Bluebeard" by Charles Perrault in 1697 (translated into English in 1729).