"what they collected is by and large what passes as the corpus of English folk song."
That remains to be debated Steve - you say that there was not a tradition of songwriting in England - I say there must have been and there are still traces of it - and it flies in the face of all the evidence to suggest there was not.
With respect to your family; as early as Sharp and his contempories, folk songs were being remembered rather than being given from living traditions.
There have been efforts on the part of some researchers to arbitrarily re-define the tradition to include ready-made and unchanged pieces (music hall - early pop etc), but as far as I can see, this has gained little ground and the recognised tradition has been long dead.
None of which changes one iota the fact that we have no idea where the songs origniated, and probably never shall.
What we do have are indications that they arose directly from within communities that passed them on to us - the use of vernacular, the familiarity with trade terms, working practices, folklore, geography, topography... all make this fairly likely - to me, if not to you.
The suggestion that there was a school of writers with a grasp of all these seems to me arrant nonsense.
This is the impression I have gained directly from two main sources - from the Irish settled tradition which was still thriving within the lifetimes of the singers we recorded, and from the Travellers who still had a living tradition, though it quickly disappeared soon after we started working with them. The latter group included a ballad seller, a survival of the old broadside trade and the nearest we have of any detailed on-the-spot information on the practice.
I really don't want to enter into a pissing-contest with you to prove whether your 40+ years is worth more or less than my 50 years; I would much rather swap real arguments.
If you can really prove that our folksongs and ballads originated on the broadside presses - show us your willie - metaphorically, of course!
Jim Carroll