"Personally I'd like to see the evidence for the provenance of some of them. I don't actually give a 💩 but there is so much staked on reverence here it is beginning to look like a religion."

Not sure who is deifying Prof Child around here. His work commands huge respect, but his modus operandi and his specific selections are hotly debated to this day.

However the provenance of his sources is pretty sound - the Percy manuscript is in the British Library, and lots of the broadsides are easily available. Steve G will tell you that Walter Scott and others doctored their raw material, but we do know that a lot of the Child canon went back to the 18th century, and plenty to the 17th. There's no great argument there.