Just to correct something I said earlier. The folksongs quoted in the Wagon and Horses chapter include:-

The Barleymow
King Arthur
My Father's a Hedger and Ditcher
I Wish, I Wish
A seven verse fragment of Lord Lovell
A complete version of The Outlandish Knight minus the parrot episode and with "tumbled him into the sea", rather than the Bill Owen's "And she chucked the old sod in the sea". This is sung by Old David, not old Davy. Old Davy was a character in the Ealing comedy film, The Maggie.

Both ballads are sung after the younger singers have decided to "give the old 'uns a turn" and both are used by FT to symbolise the passing of older folkways. I think the reason The Outlandish Knight stuck in my mind, apart from its relative completeness, is that it's the last song sung of the evening. Also, FT's preface to it; "Probably a long chain of grandfathers had sung it; but David was fated to be the last of them. It was out of date, even then, and only tolerated on account of his age."

Sad that such a magnificent ballad should be tolerated purely because of the age of the singer. However, FT was presumably reporting second hand, or maybe quoting songs she'd heard round the village, for I can't imagine she'd have been privy to these singing sessions. Therefore, two thoughts occur to me.

Firstly, she may have preferred to overlook the importance of seniority in village life. In other words, the older singers may have been saved until the last out of respect for the status which would have been attached to old age.

Secondly, I don't know when FT wrote LRTC. However, the first of the trilogy was not published until 1939, and probably written after 1907 - the year when Cecil Sharp first published English Folk-Song Some Conclusions. The point about that is that her comments on the decline of folk song echo some Sharp's comments in EFSSC a little too closely for comfort. I suspect that she may have been relying more on Sharp than on her own memories.

These points for me in no way detract from the book's significance. LRTC is partly fictionalised, but that makes it no less important than the works of Thomas Hardy, which somebody mentioned earlier.