Howard,
Who is suggesting that "the English working class in the nineteenth century were incapable of creating their own music and song"? Please read the previous postings more carefully. I don't see anyone suggesting this, least of all Steve. Of course some of our folk songs originated in this way. I can give you plenty of examples from my own collecting. For a variety of reasons very few made it into the national corpus of folk song.

I am in complete agreement with you and probably most of the people here. Why should it matter? It is the process that makes a folk song; origins are irrelevant to that. That is not a contentious issue.