There's not much I can add to what's been said already, except to point out that there's an excellent and even handed appraisal by Vic Gammon of the book in a collection of essays about Lloyd, Called Singer, Song and Scholar. I'd advise anyone who is interested in this thread to read it.

Overall, I think there are real problems with the book, which largely derive from Lloyd's apparent inability to decide(distinguish?) between scholarship and polemicism, but also from the fact that it is of its time and age. In particular, it is too deterministic, relies far too much on failed theories of social evolution, and sometimes fails to address contradictions in Lloyd's own thinking. For instance, whilst his basic evolutionary model is economic and Marxist, he dips into Tylorean/Frazerian theories of racial evolutionism for the chapter on ritual songs; apparently oblivious to the fact the two approaches are incompatible. At any rate he makes no attempt to reconcile them.

Equally, whenever I re-read the book, and I have done so several times, I am struck by Lloyd's apparent inabilty to evaluate history. Yes there is some good stuff in there, mostly derived from radical historians such as the Hammonds, A.L. Morton and E.P. Thompson. But his arguments on the effects of enclosure might have been more convincing if he had taken the entire debate on the enclosure movement into account.

Yet, I am left with the feeling that it's a great book, and vastly superior to other expositions on national folk musics I have read. I am of course thinking of Sharp's English Folksong Some Conclusions, but also of FSE's near contemporaries, The Traditional and National Music of Scotland by Francis Collinson, and Folk Music and Dances of Ireland by Breandán Breathnach.

Why do I think it's a great book ? Well, it covers a huge tract of time, stretching back before the mediaeval period almost almost into the present. Moreover, it conveys better than anything else I have ever read, the sheer richness and variety and artistic worth of folk song, and of the creative potential of ordinary people. And it is one of the few books I have ever come across which attempts to assess folk song as a sociological phenomenon. (Yes, I know Sharp went some way along that latter path in EFSSC, but he ended up being hoisted by his own neo-Darwinian pre-conceptions.)

There's another and more personal reason. I bought and devoured FSE in 1967, I think, at a time when I was a green horn apprentice with hardly any experience of the world around me, beyond a few vaguely left wing leanings to counter what I had had drummed into me by school and the British establishment. Around the same time, I first heard Ewan MacColl talking on the subject of folk song, and I was able to get hold of a paperback copy of E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. Between them they made me realise that the working class is not the collection of mute dumb ass morons, incapable of doing anything but following orders, which our "betters" would have had us believe; that we are in fact no less intelligent and articulate and artistic than anyone else.

So, I would unhestitatingly put Folk Song in England down on anyone's reading list, with the proviso that it needs to be read carefully and sceptically. But what great work doesn't ?