"My sense is that Lloyd would have preferred the "modal" tunes in the same way that, I believe, Cecil Sharp did."

I've been doing a bit of research on this very topic recently, and I think you're right. Both Sharp's '100 English Folksongs' and Lloyd and Vaughan Williams' original 'Penguin Book of English Folk Songs' favour modes other than the major (or 'Ionian'), to the extent that straightforward major tunes are in the minority in both collections. I strongly doubt that this represents accurately the range of tunes collected with English fok songs, and the 'New Penguin' collection seems to bear this out. Sharp, in his notes to '100 EFS' admits to picking interesting modal versions to represent certain songs that were overwhelmingly major in the examples that he'd found.

"Brian, my use of the word "pedant" was also ironical because I noticed and cared."

Good! Perhaps we should both start using smiley or winky faces to denote irony, Lighter? ;-)