"Guess where Walter's grandfather got all his songs?"
Walter's grandfather was ain impoverished land worker who went to sea to feed his family and ended up with them in the workhouse - I doubt if he spent many pennies buying broadsides.
Walter said that there was no trace of his family ever learning songs from print - he never saw a broadside and the only evidence of a printed version of a song in his family horde was a version of 'Bonny Bunch of Roses', which Walter learned from hearing his uncle Tom sing
Walter never threw anything away - when he died, his house was full of boxes of papers going back two generations
He told us that he once saw a street singer in North Walsham, but he coudn't recall any of his songs.
Do you know something he never told us?

"Your opinion."
Which is the point I have been making all along - all this is just our opinion Steve - yours, mine, everyone else's - we have nothing to go on for it to be anything else.
It's why I don't make pronouncements and why I wish you didn't

"Dozens of phrases from Shakespeare have been absorbed into common parlance in Britain"
Which was a two-way street Jack
There are a number of books on our shelves linking the works of Shakespeare (son of a glove-maker) with the customs and practices of his time; 'Shakespeare's Puck and his Folkslore', William Bell (1852), 'Folklore of Shakespeare' T F Thiselton Dyer (1883), 'The Flora and Folk Lore of Shakespeare' F.R. Savage (1923) and 'Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare Land', J Harvey Bloom (1929) ; all showing that Shakespeare constantly dipped into the peoples' culture for his inspiration.
The most comprehensive work, a large, two volume collection of essays by various authors, is 'Shakespeare's England (Oxford Union 19717), which deals with the lot, language, sports, fine arts, sciences... right through to music and broadsides.
That's why it's always struck me as irrational to attribute our culture to literary sources.

My paternal grandfather was one of the founders of the maritime section of The Working Mans' Association when he was at sea.
He bacame a Shakespeare nut and past the infection on to my father who passed it on to me.
He filled dozens on notebooks describing Shakespeare's works in down-to-earth North-of-England language
When he remarried and moved to Stoke on Trent, he was latched onto by a local college and invited on several occasions, to speak on his enthusiasm - in broad Scouse   
He also remembered a few shanties, which he had picked up from fellow seamen after they had gone out of use.
Jim Carroll