I wasn't being quite facetious, Bill! When I was young and foolish, I thought (when I thought of it at all) that traditional songs must be like "Greensleeves", hundreds of years old and with origins lost in the mists of time; but then I used to think of WWII in the same way, even though I was born only a few years after it ended. When I began to take a proper interest in traditional songs, I began to think that the words didn't look much like Art poetry from the 16-17th centuries, but might have matched the sort of stilted English common in early 19th century music hall songs. But if "rustic" or naïf song-makers used these stilted forms as a kind of formal English style rather than because it was fashionable (and this seems to me to be more likely), then it is not a reliable indicator of age. Songs that don't overtly identify any particular historical period are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to date, however approximately, unless some external form of provenance can be found. I guess it was a silly question, but is it possible to say with any justification, that most of the traditional songs we sing today are from, say, before the Industrial Revolution; or that they have their origins spread more-or-less evenly over,say, the 17-19th centuries?

Steve