I learned "The Maid Freed From The Gallows" (Child 95, Roud 144) from The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, but there are many, many versions found not just in the English-language tradition, but across continental Europe as well, dating back to at least 1770. The Roud index lists more than 300 entries for the song and they all tell basically the same story, though there are two different possible endings. It appears under a variety of different names, including the above-mentioned "Maid Freed...etc, etc" as well as "The Hangman," "The Ropesman," "The Gallows Tree," "The Prickly Bush," "The Sorrow Tree" and others.
In the song a young woman is about to be hanged, and asks the hangman to delay just a bit, as she sees someone coming who may offer a bribe if he'll spare her. Each person who shows up, usually a family member, arrives empty-handed until finally the condemned woman's lover arrives with the requisite bribe of gold to save her from her fate.
Some variations change the condemned to a young man, and yet others shift the perspective to the third person, telling of a devoted daughter or wife trying to save their father or husband. In these variations the woman will often sleep with the hangman in order to dissuade him from killing their loved one. Sometimes it works, but other times the hangman both takes the bribes and has sex with the woman, but then hangs the prisoner anyway.
Such is the case in probably the best-known of the variations, "Gallows Pole" as recorded by Led Zeppelin on their 1970 album Led Zeppelin III. Jimmy Page first heard the song on a recording by 12-string guitar pioneer Fred Gerlach (whose version was in turn based on that of his friend Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter) and adapted for the band.
In this version the friends of the condemned show up but are "too damn poor" to offer anything to save him. The prisoner's brother then shows up with some silver and "a little gold" to bribe the hangman. The prisoner's sister then arrives and he asks her to take the hangman off to "some shady bower" and persuade him to let her brother go. The hangman takes a look at everything on offer and still laughs at the prisoner and pulls the lever to drop him to his death.
The better known versions are pretty sparse on information on just why the protagonist is about to be hanged. In the Ledbetter/Gerlach version it seems to come down to race and class discrimination, and the very believable idea that authorities in some places would threaten to hang a man for petty crimes as a way to extort money from his family and friends. In older European versions however, it seems that there's a fairy-tale logic of the maiden having lost a golden ball or other precious object and is condemned as punishment.
Another interesting explanation is that the young woman was captured by pirates and was being held for ransom, with the threat of hanging used to encourage her family to pay up. Apparently back in the day ransoming prisoners was big business during wartime, and profitable for pirates during times of relative peace.
A final possibility that I've come across is that the"gold" stood for the young woman's virtue (ie, her virginity) and as young woman who may have been branded immoral, or possibly even pregnant out of wedlock she may have been doomed because of it until her lover stepped up and offered to redeem her by marrying her. I'm not a fan of this one, personally, because first of all it smacks a kind of icky puritanism that I'm not very fond of, but mostly because it would seem uncharacteristic of a genre of songs which happily deals in murder and adultery. Moralizing over a woman's virginity seems pretty dull compared to the possibility of pirates.
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