"Seth Lakeman's song being nominated for Best Traditional Track (not song, I notice) does raise the question as to whether a writer can compose a song, and then declare it to be traditional ..."

"Who would be able to tell? Who can tell this hasn't been done already? Does anyone know of cases where it has been done as a deliberate hoax?"

Reading this a memory stirred and delving back into my collection of old vinyl I found an LP called 'So Cheerfully Round' by the Young Tradition, 1967 (TRA 155). This contains a song called 'The Hungry Child' by Judith Piepe. According to the sleeve notes Ms. Piepe, "...came into collision with a Folk Drag-who new all about the English Tradition, and could tell a traditional song any day. So Judith wrote him a couple, which he averred were rural gems from the seventeen hundreds." As something of a "Folk Drag" myself, I have often wondered if I would have been fooled by this song ...? Actually, I think it's a rather tedious song and I was never too keen on The YT either (don't know why I bought the record).

The other possible case is a curious book called 'The Chime Child' by Ruth L. Tongue (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). The full title of this book is 'The Chime Child or Somerset Singers - Being an Account of some of them and their Songs Collected over Sixty Years'. The book contains the texts and tunes of many 'interesting' songs and with titles like: 'Mary Magdalene', 'The Carol of Christ's Donkey', 'Gillavor', 'The Three Danish Galleys' etc., etc. They sort of have the feel of trad. songs except they don't appear to have been collected anywhere else. It has been suggested that Ms. Tongue may have made them up, but no-one seems to know for sure, nor what she hoped to achieve by doing so