Sorry DtG, yes it is mostly what you said, but I did feel that when you wrote "dry tome in a mainstream bookshop", you were intending that phrase to be a bit pejorative. Those "dry tomes" are fundamental studies of events. and it is what happened that I want to know, not what people felt about it.

I am very late to this discussion, and I would not contradict what was said there, but it is important to remember the authors of the 'dry tome' are themselves in a specific time and place and subject to often unrecognised attitudes that influence the research.

Which is why you can take almost any historical subject - let's say the English Civil War as an example - and find that new aspects of it can be found every few years even at this distance in time. The same source documents are used, but their relative importance and interpretation changes. So while these academic treatises do give an account of events, it can never be 'the' account.


Long may it remain so!

As to folk songs in particular, I think most posters have it right, they are a view onto how some people understood events. Contemporary accounts definitely, but later songs also: a 1950's song about a 1888 event tells us how some people in the 1950's thought, but little about 1888.