Jim: ...as remote from the tradition as Peter Pears singing The Lyke Wake Dirge...

An aside here, but relevant i the context of this thread.

Whenever I see the lyrics for Lyke Wake Dirge printed anywhere, the chorus always finishes "And Christ receive thy saule".

When I learned the song as a nipper (and when we sang it as teenagers, doing the walk AND carrying a coffin!) we always sang "And Christ tekk up thy saule"

This to me seems much more in keeping with how it would have been phrased in Yorkshire dialect, and I'd heard it sung that way so often that when I first started hearing "receive" it grated badly, and still does.

I wonder if anyone still sings "tekk up" now, or whether, because it's written down, Suibhne would consider "receive" to be the "correct" form :-)