To be fair to Sharp and Baring Gould, they had to "clean up" the songs in order to get them published; both, as a rule, preserved the original texts in their manuscripts.  That, too, was just the way things were.  With all due respect to Kat, the deliberate bowdlerisation of what are, quite apart from anything else, historical documents is not a legitimate part of the "folk process"; that term is so often used to justify all kinds of abuses of traditional material by people who are not themselves part of that tradition.  If people feel that children are unable to deal with the real thing, perhaps they would do better to wait until they are older before broaching the subject.  Mind you, I'm not so sure that children are unable to cope with the truth, provided it's explained carefully and put in context.  It's more than a century, after all, since Baring Gould was publishing, and Cecil Sharp died in 1924.  I'd like to think that we've matured a little as a culture since then.

Malcolm