It was an extremely important work; the first serious attempt at an overview of folk song in England since Sharp's early essay; and with a scope greater than Sharp's book, which was based on, in effect, a geographically limited survey. The references certainly ought to have been more detailed, but there were doubtless practical considerations at work as well as Bert's tendency to gloss over certain (sometimes rather weak) points. Although we all learned a great deal from it, some of that was quite wrong: there are still people who believe, against all the evidence, that 'Hunting the Wren' dates back to the Peasants' Revolt, for instance. Not that Bert actually said that it did; but the ambiguity of his wording gave a lot of people that impression.

I was thinking only yesterday about what books would be most helpful for newcomers to the subject. Even with its many faults, I'd still recommend Folk Song in England as probably the best place to start, though Georgina Boyes' The Imagined Village ought to follow it, along with Sharp's own English Folk Song: Some Conclusions and David Harker's Fakesong, though the latter is really about the people involved rather the singing tradition itself. Harker's work, in its turn, contains a lot of misleading or unreliable information and is just as ideologically partisan as the people he criticizes, so Chris Bearman's articles are needed as a corrective... and so on.

On the whole, commentators tend to restrict themselves to specific areas of what has become a very big subject, and attempts at a detailed overview have been quite few and far between. They have all been flawed, not least because they have been driven in part by ideology and romanticism of one kind or another. That seems to be almost inevitable; it may be that people capable of considering the whole matter quite dispassionately are insufficiently 'driven' to undertake such a vast job.

On 'The Outlandish Knight', Lloyd was fairly accurate on the distribution of analogues in Europe, though there are probably more than that.