Jim again:-
"Vic
If you want firm evidence there isn't a shred of it either way, so all the modern scientific methods have nothing to work on apart from tracing first printed versions unless you have any way of showing these to be the first, first printing means nothing whatever."
Are you not just rephrasing the points that I was making at 10 Jul 18 - 10:08 AM? The only thing that I would disagree with is that first printing means nothing whatever. It does, Jim. It means a lot. If we can trace the date of first publication (and increasingly, we can) then we know a) the latest date that the song was written and b) how the song has changed and developed in the oral tradition since that date. Both facts would be very helpful.

Jim again
"That the broadside writers were poor poets is beyond question - I assume that Ashton, Ensworth, Hindley, et-al chose to fill their collections with the best current examples - the common feature of all these collections is that they are overwhelmingly clumsily unsingable doggerel."
Just as most poetry anywhere is clumsy and pretty awful, but not all. It was the same with broadsides. Just as most newspapers today carry a lot that is totally ephemeral and is quickly forgotten, there are some articles that stick in the mind and are worth re-writing and reprinting. Some broadside writers had the ability to write something that struck a chord, literate singers learned them from the sheet, non-literate singers learned it from them. The song took on a life of its own and changed in the mouths of the singers. That process is what we can study. The broadsheets would only be reproduced if they sold so it was the ones that had the wider appeal that were re-printed and the ones that had somehow struck a chord that reappeared.

Jim again -
"Were such writers capable of making our folk songs ?
Not in my opinion, they weren't"
Once again, Jim, it is not your value judgements, nor your opinion that carries the discussion forward.