I wrote above:

However, I would tend to agree with Bert Lloyd that the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back over centuries is a non-starter.

I was told that this was utter nonsense. You will see who said this above.

I have since looked out the book and shall now quote from it.

'No doubt in the past it was the folklorist's lack of truly intimate contact with his singers that made him see them as noble rustic savages, not only unlettered but never brought into contact with the educated world. Yet even a century and a half ago many of the finest ballad informants were among the best-educated, if self-educated, members of their community.'

Regarding 'travellers' (SIC) he says 'even among the folk on the road it is usually the best educated, the book-and newpaper-readers, the alert and progressive thinkers, who provide the most important, most coherent songs.... Far from illiteracy being, as some have pretended, almost a sine qua non of the authentic folklore condition, at least where ballads are concerned it is probably a negative factor, as the experienced American collector Phillips Barry maintained.'

Lloyd discusses the idea of 'orality later in the chapter on page 24. He takes on broadsheets on page 27, saying that these and the rest of folk song are 'as mixed as Psyche's seeds'.

Therefore, I would argue that I was not writing 'utter nonsense' when I said that Lloyd did not agree with the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back centuries. The 'Psyche's seeds' simile, when added to his comments about literacy and illiteracy, seem to me to prove that I was not talking 'utter nonsense'. You may quibble about the detail, but 'utter nonsense' will not do.

Just on the topic of Sharp, Lloyd describes his views as 'an ideology of primitive romanticism with a vengeance'. But then he approves a Sharpian definition of folksong ie the 1954 one.