Three Men Went a-Hunting

"Three Men Went a-Hunting", also known as "We Hunted and We Halloed", "Look Ye There, Now", "Three Jolly Hunters", "The Three Huntsmen", "Twas of Three Jolly Welshmen" or "Three Jovial Welshmen" is an English song found in North and South England, Scotland and Wales), United States and maritime Canada.
Fragments of it appear in a couple of early 17th century English plays. What appears to be a stanza of this piece is quoted in the Shakespeare/Fletcher play The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1611). In act III.v, the mad jailer's daughter sings:

There was three fools, fell out about an howlet,
The one sed it was an owl, the other he sed nay,
The third he sed it was a hawk,
and her bels were cut away

and a stanza in William Davenant's 1668 play The Rivals seems to be on the same theme.
The song must have been fairly popular and was brought by the people who emigrated here from Great Britain. Versions have been collected all along the American Atlantic seaboard and into the Appalachian Mountains.
It was printed in Belden's Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society (1955), (as "Three Jolly Welshmen", Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (1946-1950) (as "We Hunted and Hollered"), Randolph's Roll Me in Your Arms: "Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore (1992) (as "Three Jolly Huntsmen"), Morris's Folksongs of Florida (1950) (as "The Three Huntsmen"), Linscott's Folk Songs of Old New England (1939) (as "Three Jovial Huntsmen"), Lomax's Folk Songs Of North America (1960) (as "Cape Ann"), Williams's Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (1923) (as "Twas of Three Jolly Welshman"), Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (1975) (as "Three Men Went A-Hunting"), Hamer's Green Groves: More English Folk Songs (1973) (as "The Englishman, Irishman And Scotsman"), Karpeles' The Crystal Spring: English Folk Songs Collected by Cecil Sharp (1975) (as "Three Jolly Hunstmen"), Gardham's An East Riding Songster (1982) (as "Three Men They Went a Hunting"), Creighton's Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1932) (as "Three Men Went A-Hunting"), Cohen/Seeger/Wood's New Lost City Ramblers Songbook (1964) (as "Three Men Went A-Hunting"), Botkin's A Treasury of New England Folklore (1965) (as "Cape Ann"), Baring-Gould's Annotated Mother Goose (1962) (as "There were three jovial Welshmen"), Silber & Silber's Folksinger's Wordbook (1973) (as "Cape Ann") and others.
It appears in the Roud Index of Folk Songs as #283.
It was recorded by the Elliott Family on The Elliots of Birtley (1962) (as "We Went Along a Bit Further"), George Endicott on Field Trip - England (1959 (as "Three Scamping Rogues"), A. L. Lloyd on All for Me Grog: English Drinking Songs (1956) (as "Three Drunken Huntsmen"), Byrd Moore & his Hot Shots as "Three Men Went A-Hunting" (1929), New Lost City Ramblers on New Lost City Ramblers, Vol. 3 (1961) (as "Three Men Went a-Hunting") (The "outhouse" verse was composed by the New Lost City Ramblers when they covered the 1929 Byrd Moore & his Hot Shots record), Hywel Wood on Folk Songs of Britain, Vol. X: Animal Songs (1971) as ("Three Men Went a-Hunting") and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman on Not For Kids Only (2006).