The societal conditions of your Old Popular Trad. Folk Song were defined by unavailable technology, oral / aural transmission, & a distinct lack of copyrighting. These songs were crafted by vernacular masters of their art and sang on, remade, free-styled and made afresh with each performance as they ran amock being fruitful & multiplying in their natural habitat. New songs were made in the image of old and away they went throughout the English Speaking Universe and beyond, their idiomatic morphology determined by cultural craft and by what worked best in the vernacular tongue. Few composers names have come down to us though I believe Tommy Armstrong is a contender to be considered as one such Master of the Traditional Idiom (he certainly was more than casually acquainted with it) and perhaps, on another level, Rudyard Kipling was another, but maybe that is an argument for another day. One thing is clear, these songs did not grow on trees, but are as much the work of human craftspersons as the hedges, ditches, drystone walls, capentry, brick-laying, wheelwrighting, coopering, farriering, smithing etc. etc. - extant examples of which are just as masterful, just as traditional and just as anonymous as the Old Songs.

Self-consciously crafting folk songs in the traditional idiom is a perilous business, but as we've seen on this thread & elsewhere people can & do get it right. Ron Baxter has got it right on more than the one occasion, though to what extent his songs have then become Traditional in & of themselves is difficult to say, though I have heard them sung by people who assumed they were singing a traditional song. Is that a sign of something entering the Tradition? Or just lack of information? Was the original craft of Traditional Song determined by its essential oral / aural medium which invariably doesn't carry composer credits or copyright notice? Maybe so, but whatever the case I think there's more to a Traditional Song than the criteria being discussed here; I don't accept either LOHAG & YNWA to be Traditional Songs because the idiom's completely wrong - musicologically they are something else altogether.

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Anyway, I'd like to nominate Ron Baxter's Saint Anne of Dunkirk as a New Traditional Song because it's the work of a revival master working in the idiom of Trad. Folk Song, and it's a cracking piece. I'll put up a YouTube in the text few days so you can hear the melody I put to it, which, incidentally, arose under my fingertips from the depths of my own creative sub-consciousness which itself taps into the collective wonder of which all individuals are but manifestations of.

The Saint Anne of Dunkirk, Or The Spanish Ship, Being a Tale of Civil Warfare & Ship-Loss, Written by Mr Ron Baxter & Set to Music, in Seance, by Mr Sedayne

The Saint Anne of Dunkirk by the seas much hurt
Seeking a haven limped into the Wyre
There Parliaments soldiers they swarmed aboard her
To steal her canon it was their desire.
But James, Earl of Derby, of the kings army,
Quickly set off with a troupe of horse, boys,
To stop their endeavour and with them to engage.

The Spaniard he swore this isn't my war
But bold Major Sparrow he would not be swayed;
Orders have come - shot, powder and gun -
To Lancaster Castle they must be conveyed.
So wagons he sought for the guns to transport,
And to defend them he called up his men:
Three hundred troupers were at his command.

He marched through Layton, with pike and gun waiting
But when Derby advanced, oh, he sounded retreat;
Streamed on through Carleton, fled on past Poulton,
Though no shot was fired the rout was complete.
The Wyre did ford and with one accord,
They never stopped, boys, 'til Preesall hill top,
Screaming that Derby was hard on their heels.

And so the Saint Anne fell to Derby's hands
But he had no time for the guns to remove;
For far outnumbered and with guns encumbered
If brought into battle the fight he would lose.
So the guns he did spike Major Sparrow to spite,
And as he retired the Saint Anne he fired,
and left her a beacon to blaze in the night.

As a foot-note to this tale, it's said that the Spanish sailors from the Saint Anne were sent out on their way as vagabonds where their existence on the Fylde is unrecorded but for exeption of several graves in the cemetary of St. Michael's-on-Wyre which are known traditionally as The Soldiers Graves and said to contain the bodies of certain of the Spanish crew of the Saint Anne. How and when they died is not recorded, but given the craftsmanship of the graves and their proximity to the church itself respectful burials can be assumed.