"As for the rest......well you know."
Not the place here Steve and probably not the best time while this site is acting up, but it seems to me that, in claiming as many songs originating on broadsides as you do is disenfranchising the folk (ordinary people) from the creation of their music - you really need to be able to prove such a serious suggestion beyond relying on earliest printed versions.
It's been our experience over the last forty years that farmers, fishermen, road-workers, et al are far more likely to have produced our folk-songs than did a school of anonymous bad poets (hacks).
Ordinary (whatever that means) made songs by the hundreds - we recorded dozens of them just on a small section of the West Coast of Clare and from illiterate Travellers.
Miners and mill workers made songs, bothy workers made songs (I believe you conceded that), I have little doubt that merchant seamen made songs describing their lives and thoughts.
One old farmer put it in a nutshell a couple of years ago - "If a man farted in church when I was young, somebody made a song about it".
I believe this to be far too serious a subject to allow to let go - it harks back to the old arguments that "the people were incapable of making the ballads" (this would be the same people who queued up in Elizabethan London to catch the first performance of Hamlet).
When this site settles down, I suggest we take this up seriously and see if we can't avoid the "romanticism" level arguments this time or get bogged down in chimney-sweeping technicalities.
People were capable of making songs, people did make songs by the hundreds, there is no reason in the world why they didn't make the songs we call folk-songs.
Jim Carroll