More thread drift - Is there any reason to believe that the ballads were not the production of 'talented composers' who happened to be 'of the folk?' There was no master's degree in folk composition in the eighteenth century. A ballad writer would be, by definition, someone who composed stories set to familiar tunes. Like most writers, I have to imagine these people also worked a number of other jobs throughout their lives. Why couldn't 'part-time ballad writer/singer/hawker' be a working class occupation? Certainly, print was a crucial method of diffusion, but I don't think the medium of print is necessarily a mark of middle-class/bourgoisie origin.