Even with Child Ballads Child included in ESPB we have question marks around probably most of them regarding whether they came unadulterated from oral tradition. The best we can do is to look to see if the material they contain is corroborated by multiple other versions or not. Any version that has material in it not found elsewhere naturally comes under suspicion. Child himself in the earlier parts, upto about half way through the publishing, flagged up many of the suspect versions, but then for some reason we haven't yet
ascertained he stopped this practice, even though we do know he had even more qualms about the later material. He then left us with the tantalising statement in Vol5 p182 (Dover)