You seem to be talking about another person called Child. He was an academic anthologist strictly speaking, but he was well aware about the difference between print and oral tradition. He though those from print were vastly inferior and strove to only include those ballads that were professed by their collectors to be from oral tradition. He didn't publish Percy's Reliques ballads as doctored by Percy, he went to great lengths to gain access to Percy's manuscripts, as he did with the ballads from all of the collections. You do him a great disservice. He only latterly included versions from the likes of Douce to ballads he already had as oral versions. In ESPB he avoided items from the Reliques like the plague. Are you looking at his earlier anthology from the 1860s by any chance?

The Robin Hood Ballads are an exception. He included all of these, even the literary ones only available from broadsides, for the sake of completeness and the fact that they were written in traditional style and contained many of the attributes of the true ballads.