"Those weren't my words. I was quoting Steve."
Apologies Richard, my mistake.
Steve is somewhat prone to making such sweepingly dismissive statements based on, as far as I can see, little evidence of their accuracy.
Opinions such has these have, I believe, stood in the way of our understanding our folk literature and I really hoped we had moved on from them.
We simply don't know what the ballad makers thought or knew, simply because we have no idea who they were and when the ballads were made.
Steve seems to have done a good job in tracing when some of them first went into print, but that, as I have said, is no indication that they hadn't been taken from an existing oral form and re-made.
We know that some ballads appeared in oral story form and existed side-by-side with the sung versions.
We also know that many of the motifs are common to literary creations, as well as folk songs and tales and have been around for centuries, possibly millennia.
What little information we have put together indicates that the rural working classes, peasantry... whatever you care to call them were skilled song-makers, as far as Ireland is concerned, right up to the middle of the 20th century.
One 90-odd year old singer we are recording has recently told us "Whatever happened, somebody made a song anout it, and if nothing was happening, they made a song about that as well".   
We've recorded quite a lot of local songs made in the 20th century and have heard references to at least 100 hundred made in the immediate vicinity of this somewhat isolated one-street town in the West of Ireland.
I have little doubt that this has been the case throughout rural Ireland and can see no reason why it should not have been the case throughout England and Scotland.
One of the vital factors in song-making seems to have been the health of the oral tradition in the areas, whether song-makers had an established template on which to make new songs - certainly the case here.
I don't want to go on too much without Steve' input to all of this - just trying to sum up my general feelings on the matter
Sorry for having blamed you for somebody else s unqualified statement
Jim Carroll