Now things get slippery. All we can say of the original authors are that they are 'anon'. That's a helluva leap from saying the songs are of the people.

"Don't interrupt while the adults are talking otherwise you'll be put to bed without any tea",

This unthinking juvenile says there is sufficient evidence of syuzhet and fabula in your average Child ballad to infer authorship. That may be a Georgian Gershwin or in might be a Victorian Stock, Aitken and Waterman but there is a narrator embedded within at a more elevated level than the pub singaround. The ballads do not suggest Chap A sings 'Johnny went to sea' into his ale and Chap B replies, 'Jimmy went a soldier-ing', they contain discrete and clear intelligences, plot and story development of a populist kind and the evidence for that is abundent.

The slight of hand occurs when Folk moves beyond 'author unknown' to 'the people' as a shorthand for the arcadian masses. The masses couldn't have written them, talented individuals who knew what people dug did.