> These people all had their own collections of broadsides and were well aware where the songs originated. It didn't suit their purposes to make this widely known at the time.

Singly or in tandem, Jim and Steve know far more about this than I do, but my impression has been that Sharp et al. were so romantically committed to the idea of "Merrie England" that they simply refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes.

As I've said many times, one can always assert - and believe - on the basis of "the folk tradition" that any song is far older than its first reference in print.

Undoubtedly this is true of many songs, but simply assuming it to be the case for any given example tells us nothing.

If the "folk tradition" (in other words, creative singers) had been as powerfully influential as many believe, broadside songs would have tended to improve rather than decay, and I expect there would have been far more truly excellent variants of words of the ballads than there really are.

In my view, it cannot be an accident that so many of the most satisfying ballad texts seem to have been processed by literarily sophisticated individuals like Burns, Scott, and Anna Brown of Falkland.