Sue:<<<<<'If the same applies to the ballad sellers in Norfolk, this might explain where Pardon's grandfather got the tunes when these were roughly the same as those traditionally used for those songs?

Maybe this is something Steve Gardham might have a view on?'>>>>>>

Whilst accepting that written evidence is somewhat slim, what description there is of such activities is that those who went about selling the broadsheets at markets and on the streets of towns did actually sing the songs, often to fairly standard tunes, or where the songs had come from the theatre they were being sung in the taverns and gatherings by those who had been to see the performances. Think 'Lord Lovel, Bushes and Briars, Green Bushes'

Let us choose a suitable period for the dissemination of the tunes, say 1800 to 1850, which is when most of those who sang for the likes of Sharp learnt their songs. Prior to mass entertainment that the Music Hall era brought these printed ballads were extremely popular, some being printed and sold all over the country in their hundreds of thousands, so it is not hard to imagine a large portion of the population being party to the dissemination and singing of them. The more popular they were amongst the people on the street the more were printed, supply and demand, just like today's pop music.

Now to the fact that some of the ballads, generally those most widely sung, in the form they were collected from oral tradition there is very little variation in the tune from version to version, e'g., Seeds of Love, All Jolly fellows, Sweet Primroses.

Conversely, by and large, those that were printed in small numbers and only collected from oral tradition fairly infrequently tend to have been set to different tunes. This may have been because the handful of chaunters who went to different parts of the country singing them were unaware of the original tune and had not heard each other sing it.

Reasons why you can come across several different ballads using the same tune is that the writers often set their ballads to existing tunes, and also the chaunters often had a stock of say 20 tunes that they tended to put to what they were selling, whichever fitted best.

I can recommend Henry Mayhew's books for contemporary descriptions of the processes, the writers, the printers, and the sellers. Yes, the same chap who wrote 'Villikins' albeit adapted from an earlier song.