While WalkaboutsVerse is an attention seeking clown who writes terrible poetry, is an appalling recorder player and singer and is completely out of his depth when it comes to elementary music theory, does it occur to anyone that his opening post for this thread is basically right?

For the most part, English vernacular music before the first half of the nineteenth century was melodic in nature. (I call it vernacular because folk music didn't exist before 1954.) There is some evidence of part playing, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Singing was largely unaccompanied solo and dance music manuscripts from the period rarely give anything but a melody line.

The melodeon, which seems such a fundamental part of English traditional music, is a German invention and the anglo concertina derives from the German concertina invented by Uhlig of Chemnitz. Multiculturalism strikes again. The guitar only came into "folk" music in any big way during the twentieth century, probably from America.

Just because WalkaboutsVerse said it, it doesn't mean it's wrong.