Apologies, Joe
I have genuinely tried hard to stay out of this one but when someone is constantly misquoting you and twisting your words it's quite difficult not to defend yourself.

Pseud, when I wrote 'FACT...……...first appeared' it should actually say 'earliest extant version' which is what I have published. Obviously this cannot guarantee that there wasn't something before that, which is why the following statement is only an OPINION, but nevertheless based upon examining hundreds of thousands of examples of all related genres.
This included studying the actual ballads themselves and what we can find of their evolution, contemporary accounts of interviews with ballad writers, named authors, stylistic characteristics and many many other clues contained within the texts themselves such as datable events, historical and social clues. Then of course there is the added weight of other scholars who have studied the material in detail and independently have come to the same conclusions.

Part of the problem of the romanticist outlook is these people have not studied the material in any detail.