The Recruited Collier, and the issue of A. L. Lloyd's rôle in making it into the song we now know, just now came up in another thread. Rather than interrupt further the progress of that discussion, I'll post the following here; wary though I am of reviving old threads in case they attract too much repetition.

In a discussion of Lloyd's editorial practices in the preparation of Come All Ye Bold Miners, Roy Palmer wrote:

"It is clear that Lloyd's editorial approach was not merely to reproduce the material sent to him. Sometimes the changes made were small... but others were far-reaching. On 'Jimmy's Enlisted (or the Recruited Collier)' Lloyd laconically notes: 'Text from J.H. Huxtable, of Workington. A version of this ballad appears in R. Anderson's Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect (1808).' In fact, the original is entitled simply 'Jenny's Complaint', and features not a miner who enlists but a ploughman. A third party, Nicol, talks to Jenny about the wars, and Jemmy (as he is called) merely 'led' (carted) the coals which remind Jenny of him. Lloyd silently (and brilliantly) remade the song. Although one phrase, 'I'se leetin', sits uncomfortably in the new text the adaptation has enjoyed considerable success, to a tune also supplied by Lloyd to replace 'Nancy to the Greenwood Gane', which Anderson prescribed."

Palmer also prints a facsimile of a brief letter from Lloyd which refers to the tune. Lloyd wrote:

"I fitted the tune; but whether I made up the melody or took it from tradition I no longer remember. I think the latter; but if so, what was it the tune of?"

Roy Palmer, A. L. Lloyd and Industrial Song, in Ian Russell, ed., Singer, Song and Scholar, Sheffield Academic Press, 1986, pp.135-7.

I haven't seen the Anderson book; Roy Palmer, of course, has. Whether or not any communication from a J. H. Huxtable survives in Lloyd's papers is unknown; they are held at Goldsmith's College, London, but I don't think they have been fully indexed. Palmer's implication seems to be that the "Huxtable" text was from Anderson's book, but I'm not qualified to comment on that.