This is pretty self-explanatory, but I thought I would define something that I thought was very clever. "One lousy handful of earth," concerns the rites of seisin. Before most people could read and write, deeds were an impractical way of the transfering land, so they would bring out witnesses, and the grantor would take a handful of earth from the land in question and give it to the grantee, and call out the land's boundaries. Of course, this was never done among lower tenants (workers).

This song is about an honest young man who becomes entangled with a pretty girls' act of theft and is sent to Van Dieman's Land. I had to look up a few things that are very interesting. Van Dieman's Land is today called Tazmania. It was a British penal colony. "A gentleman claimed his jury" was very confusing to me, but I have done the best I can. Based on Black's Law and a brief peek at "Commentaries on the Laws of England," I have concluded that this most likely refers to a "claim of cognizance." If I understand it correctly, at Common Law, the King had given some persons/institutions the power to intervene on behalf of a class of people in future criminal trials, have those people released and decide what punishment that person deserved himself/itself. For instance, if a scholar was accused of a crime and his university had the right of cognizance, the university could clear the charges and decide what should happen to the scholar, rather than the court. In the present case, it seems that "a gentleman," probably the landlord of the area, had cognizance over his tenants, and sentenced the narrator and girl to "transportation" (which Wiki says at this time meant, "penal transportation"). This might have been profitable for the gentleman or his friends, since much of the forced labor in Van Dieman's land was for the benefit of private citizens.