I find this questioning of whether there is a tradition, odd, to say the least.
We have a large body of songs collected by Sharp and his contemporaries, mainly from the agricultural working people.
In the 1950s, we got the same songs, in widely differing versions collected from the same social group of people by the BBC
One of the great revelations to us is finding the same group of songs in the rural west of Ireland - Lord Lovel, Lord Bateman, Katherine Jafferay, The Suffolk Miracle, The Outlandish Knight were some of the ballads; Banks of Sweet Dundee, The Grey Mare (Young Roger Esquire), The False Lover, Farmer and the Grocer..... a couple of months ago we took down a version of The Girl with a Box on Her Head from a ninety odd year old man.... all probably originating in Britain, but all claimed to have been in the family for centuries.
The biggest surprise was the huge repertoire of anonymous local songs made about everyday life here in the West - land politics, shipwrecks, drinking bouts, murders.... right through to a lament for when a beloved local priest was moved on to another parish.
If these aren't 'folk songs', they are convincing enough fakes to have me fooled
Jim Carroll