Here is another point of view on how to treat research from the past, from Vic Gammon:

" I must admit to some ... diffidence when I published my 'Song, Sex and Society' article … a couple of years ago. I found it hard to criticise a man who had given me so much. We have to overcome such feelings if the work is to progress. We have seen the results of intellectual fossilisation ...'

Gammon wrote this way back in 1984. It is one of several pieces which explain how Lloyd was influenced by AL Morton's Marxist history of Britain. I think it is well worth a read, as is more or less anything by Gammon. He has a website for anybody interested.

Roy Palmer has also analysed and critiquing Child's work; producing a well-argued piece in 1996, which has the additional merit of giving us a fair account of what Child's 'dunghill' comment actually meant, together with some insight into the complicated and, possibly, ultimately confused thinking which determined which songs and versions went in and which were left out of the work and which put in.

To complain about these interesting and well=argued critiques seems to me to be unreasonable. Sharp, Child, and Lloyd, were not gods before whom we are required to prostrate ourselves and there seems to me to be something rather unfolk-like about behaving as if they were.