>>>>>>>I don't know about that ploughman but his community included people who could improvise songs, shanty style, and also sing songs borrowed from neighbouring cultures.<<<<<<



Neither of these are unusual although they are quite rare in collections in England. I am currently very happy to be involved in projects with Nick Dow:

He recently gave me some wonderful recordings of traveller families he knows and one of the songs is of the shanty type although actually from a navvying situation, no doubt composed by navvies themselves or their families.

Nick and his friends in Dorset also discovered that a good number of the songs in the Hammond Mss are obviously Scottish and they were able to put this down to the visiting Scottish regiments in the early nineteenth century.

Just as a matter of interest where were you observing this?

A good song is a good song no matter what the source!

Regarding evidence of this prior to the 20th century, the best evidence lies within the songs themselves. The bulk of the songs collected in England since the 1880s are of the narrative sort obviously written by a single author, albeit at times using stock phrases and even stock stanzas.