@ Brian, interesting points, and apologies if I/we have made you repeat stuff you said before. However, this idea about ballad hawkers would seem to me to be at odds with the idea of some purely oral tradition of song transmission, which is what Sharp himself seems to have been arguing for in his definition of the 'common people'. Am I not making sense? Sorry if not. And of course people are free to disagree with me.

@ Jag: again interesting points; I had not picked up on Harker's dissatisfaction with the '54 defn, though I was aware from his overall arguments that he would think this way, especially about more modern contexts. So I think you have made a good point, but, alas, discussions of definitions as we all know, tend to lead to fallings-out.

@ Steve. "The vast majority of the middle class had no notion of what the 'peasants' were singing at that time." I cannot agree, but depending upon how you define 'middle class' maybe some did?

Sharp collected from 311 singers. Bearman provides a study, giving various amounts of information for up to 278, including occupations for 238. So there were 5 women of 'independent means' which of course might include servants given a pension by former employers etc. One woman is listed as 'daughter of vicar'. Bearman argues (using a dictionary definition of 'working class' that it is not possible to decide whether some respondents were 'working class' as they might have been 'self-employed'. Conversely some blacksmiths might have been employed (as a blacksmith ancestor of mine was at one point).

I'll quote Bearman. Please don't assume this means I agree with him:

"A substantial minority of the singers were not by any definition 'working class', and this group included some of Sharp's best sources, such as William Spearing … At the highest level this group shaded into the local elite... Templeman had a mixed farm of 630 acres and employed 14 people."

This is from Bearman's article "Who Were the Folk..." which I got from JSTOR.