To clarify, Bert rarely wrote ENTIRELY new songs and passed them off as old. What he did most of the time was to take an old song or an old poem, or several old songs and poems, and cobble lines together. Then he would write a stanza here or there, a line here or there, to fill in the gaps. So Lloyd's "Reynardine" has lines and words from Herbert Hughes, Joseph Campbell, A.E. Housman, and Lloyd himself, in addition to the broadside ballad. In "The Recruited Collier," he started with a poem by Robert Anderson and made his own, fairly drastic, changes.

In both of these cases, Lloyd claimed to have collected the song from someone else: "Reynardine," he said, was sung to him by Tom Cook of Eastbridge, Suffolk, while "The Recruited Collier" was sent to him in manuscript by a Mr. Huxtable of Workington. Neither source was ever located in any records outside Lloyd's own claims, and the purported Huxtable manuscript of "The Recruited Collier" has never surfaced either.

Where ideology came into it was that it seems Lloyd would take songs that were essentially rural (like "Jenny's Complaint" or "The Weaver in Love") and specifically turn them into "industrial folksongs," by changing the protagonists from rural occupations (a ploughboy and a serving-maid) to industrial ones (a collier and a "factory maid.")

He was, at the same time, attempting to argue through his scholarship that "industrial folksong" was a crucial and neglected area for research. It is for this reason that his falsifying such songs was wrong--he was essentially presenting bogus "industrial folksongs" to bolster his argument that there were a lot of industrial folksongs out there waiting to be collected. Whatever one's take on Lloyd as a person or as a singer, I think it's pretty clear this wasn't helpful to future scholars. Since the goal of scholarship is to clarify, not confuse, Lloyd must be seen as a failure AS A SCHOLAR.

As a singer, teacher, friend, revivalist, and loving family man, we can all agree he was a great success.