Cecil Sharp was well aware that some of the people that he was meeting in the Appalachians were of Scottish and Irish stock. He also says that many of the ballads that he was collecting in the mountains - ballads that he had not previously collected in England - were known to him from Scottish ballad books. I think that Sharp saw a connection between the songs that he had collected in England and with the fact that many of these songs were also being found by Scottish collectors. This does not explain why he used the word 'English' for the title of his Appalachian song book. For some curious reason, it seems that many Victorian and    Edwardian people in England used the term 'England' when referring to 'Britain'. Please don't ask me why, because I don't know why this should have been the case. Jeremy Paxman mentions this in his 1998 book 'The English: A Portrait of a People'. I go onto this in further detail in my 2004 book 'Dear Companion. Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection' p. 24. I also mention Maud Karpeles' comment that about one third of Sharp's Appalachian collection was Scottish in origin. Sharp also believed that there was a melodic connection between his collected Appalachian tunes and some of the gapped scales that had once been found in the north of England.