"whether or not it conforms to my or Cecil Sharp's definition of whether it was 'folk song'. "
It really is time this one was put to bed Briain
Whatever Sharp thought and whatever mistakes he made, we are discussing what we all thought up till recently - including you, no doubt
If he was wrong, so were we all
I find what people sang centuries ago interesting too - that doesn't make it folk

"I don't think anybody has ever really claimed 100% print origin even for the classic corpus, "
Please don't make me trawl through all the threads again Richard
I don't make things up - I've never seen the point in sdoing so
Jim