Points well taken, Steve. The rugby singers, moreover, being generally more literate than the 19th century working class, are more likely to appreciate nuance, wordplay, tonal effects, Establishment-blasting excess, etc.

My guess, though, is that many of the rugby songs originated in or were enormously encouraged by the singing of junior military and naval officers in the First World War. We know a little about the rowdy off-duty sing-songs of RAF pilots - from the same social strata as the rugby players, and quite as likely to make new songs or parody old ones. And rugby was also an enormously popular off-duty activity. We also know a little about the RN tradition of the "sods' opera," a pastime largely devoted to the circulation of bawdy songs. (Presumably it predates 1914.)

Very much of the current rugby repertoire seems to have been in place by 1945. Speaking generally, (white) American bawdy songs seem, until recently, to have been cruder in diction, less elaborate, less numerous, and less ingenious than the rugby songs - despite a certain amount of overlap. (See Randolph-Legman, for example). We know very little of black American bawdy songs before the blues (and even after), but the recitation of bawdy so-called "toasts" - with no holds barred - is likely to be well over a century old. "Toasts," of course, are the chief progenitors of rap.

The Australian repertoire seems to be much like the British, equally witty but possibly even coarser.

But these conclusions are tentative and possibly incorrect. We'd know much more if Legman's vast collection were to appear, but I have no information that that is likely to happen.