"As for styles etc, I believe that we have become far too academic and removed from the original source. "

Perhaps I should have used the word "precious".

Of course there are original sources available in the form of old collections and old recordings. Steven Baldwin has been mentioned and I have fiddle collections from the North and from East Anglia. In all of them it is difficult to define a style owing to the poor recording and, let us not mince words, the less than brilliant playing. However, because these exist are we to take them as the pardigms of English style and so shun any modern playing that differs from these set models?

I prefer to look at more abstract sources, like Hardy, that can give us clues. There was a great furore when Fairport and Steeleye came on the scene because traditional musicians did not use electric instruments. Of course they didn't: for obvius reasons but, you can bet your life that they would have seized on any instrument that would have helped them get more beer for their night's work. Hardy, as well, gives us an insight into the competence (or otherwise) of rural musicians. We are, perhaps led astray by memories of Swarb playing for the dance in Far from the Madding Crowd or from the professionals in smocks and breeches who turn up in costume dramas. Go back to Baldwin and other early recordings to see what our forebears listened to.