@Pseudonymous

In using 'social scale' I was trying to avoid terms that may have a formal meaning. If we had the occupations of all the collector's subjects we would still need a statistical breakdown of occupations in a village or small town to make much sense of them. To interpret that in terms of musical influences we would also need a description of the musical life of the communities as a whole.

Census records and parish registers (and a lot of work) should give an idea of the spread of occupations and mobility. Surely someone has done that? It may be something that is quietly being crowd sourced on the various ancestry web sites - following my own family tree (done mainly by a relative I don't know) back gives a fascinating snapshot of the movement of people from the country to industrial towns.

Has anyone tried to do a 'quantitative' study of the musical life of a village or town? Somewhere way up the thread that I can't find Jack Campin commented that on a Sunday someone in English village could have been ringing the church bells, singing in the choir and then doing something secular that I can't remember. How many people in the parish, how many bells in the church tower, how many in the choir or before that the church band, how many pubs, did the nearest market town have a band, a music hall, annual fair etc? How many in both the choir/band also ringing the bells. I'm told that the 'five minute bell' in many churches was so that some of the bellringers could scramble down the steps and put their togs on for the choir. I guess the same happened if one had to sort out his serpent or clarionet. For a lot of this stuff discussions on the web often fall back on fiction, or fictionalised accounts, from writers such as Thomas Hardy.

How many free-reed instruments were sold in England in a decade and where did they go?

Even if someone is only interested in 'folk song' how can they theorise about it without knowing what else the folk sang, played, and heard?