"I am 100% right on this one. No opinions needed!"
You usually are Steve Doesn't make the slightest difference that whatever your book says contradicts all the other evidence
"You are perfectly entitled to your opinions and I am perfectly entitled to mine."
True, but I've always taken the view that those of us who have become involved in research have a responsibility to those we have collected from to get it right - and not make unsubstantiated and definitive statements unless we are prepared to defend them with facts - you are attempting to undermine the whole idea that the English working people were incapable of creating their own musical traditions and were forced to farm them out to indifferent to bad writers.
You have also attempted to undermine the oral tradition by suggesting that they were not even responsible for the versions - that is as destructive and as irresponsible as it gets - if you are going to make such profoundly destructive statements (you have never given them as opinions) you have the responsibility to back them up with hard facts and not unsubstiated and unprovable paperwork - or, at the very least, disprove by logic what scholars and researchers have always believed (including Child and Hindly, respectively leading experts on ballads and broadsides - bith of whol you have dismissed as being "wrong".
You have totally failed to respond to challenges to your ideas other than with unthought-out "what ifs", relying totally on a paper chase and a list of those who support you - that is appalling scholarship.
"basing your opinions largely on the study of oral tradition"
That is a claim of something you could not possibly.
I have based my conclusions on bringing together my knowledge of the tradition, gathered from the work of others, with thirty years of collecting from as many of the remaining source singers we could find and spend time with, to see if the the two made sense - we found that much of it did.
The one thing we are sure about above all other things, working people were natural composers and poets who recorded their life experiences - not as old people sitting at home in their retirement, but as whole communities. This you have passed off as unimportant "nuiffin' to do with England, they were too bust".
You have reduced our song traditions as being indistinguishable from the output of the latest boy bands, and you have admitted as much, (I'll pull that up for you if you insist).
You have shown no understanding of the oral tradition - deep or otherwise, you have all but dismissed it as a creative form, while at the same time conceding that both Ireland and Scotland have creative traditions - why on earth do you think that is - do they both have something the English don't have?      
By the way - you even got it wrong on your own "Mutton Pie" being a local song in the sense I described "local" - it was also recorded in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire - part of the national repertoire.   
Sorry I can't with you luck in your enterprise.
Jim Carroll