"but I still don't agree that this was the case in 19th century southern England"
We simply don't know Steve - we have a tip-of-the iceberg guide to what made up the repertoire of the rural communities from 1899 onward, and what was documented went through the filters of gentlemen and lady collectors who had a very fixed idea of what they were looking for - the established folk song repertoire.
At the turn of the century the oral tradition was very much on the skids and collectors like Sharp were describing to as a thing of the past.
Burstow was never interviewed to any length abort the role of his songs and whether he lumped them all together; by the time Arthur Howard came along the singing tradition was a dim and distant memory with the exception of some small survivals.
Walter Pardon had a wide range of songs - music hall, Victorian Parlor ballads, early pop songs - but he spoke for hours on which he regarded as which
Blind Traveller, Mary Delaney had somewhere between 1 and 2 hundred traditional songs in her repertoire which she could have doubled, but firmly refused to do so because "they're not what you are looking for" (we never specified - she did).
This was a continuous thread running through our work and depending on what value the singers put of their songs.
"This is just silly, Jim."
'Fraid not Steve
You can sometimes date a song by its subject matter and you can identify its possible origins by the style in which it was made, but finding the earliest printed version does nothing but - well,.... give an indication to the earliest printed version - no more.
We have no idea if most of the songs existed in oral form prior to those dates.
Jim Carroll