Sarah, many thanks to you and Craig Morgan Robson for a superb ballad forum, vocal harmony workshop and evening performance at the Lewes Arms a couple of weeks ago!

The taboo relationships which appear in ballads are all ones which produce children, whose presence adds to the tragedy and could complicate inheritance if they survived.

I wonder if the absence of children from same-sex relationships is the main reason they don't feature in the tradition; this is only a surmise.

Valmai (Lewes)