Thanks a lot -especially Joe for clearing up the title.

Something that suggested this thread to me was the strong point that Melvyn and Bill both make that if we could return to say, the 14C just how confusing would we find language. Move on then to the traditional songs that have been collected and the language seems very recent - not old at all.

Now, this could be the nature of the oral tradition, people re-working songs to suite their mode of speech, or are we just wishing songs to be much older than they really are?

Is it true, for instance, that nearly all the songs collected by Sharp et al had appeared as Broadsides 50 years (?) earlier and that the origin of most old songs is in a written tradition which in practice is not very different from the way most songs have recently been written?