Wow, you did a great job, Karen.
That's a very throughough examination, it makes the songs spotty history quite a bit clearer to us.

It's amazing how one reference to the "Unfortunate Rake" air by Frank Kidson made so many following scholars/researchers refer to the "Unfortunate Lad" song family by that title as if the connection between the air and the broadside ballad was a proven fact.
It's the old equivalent to the modern habit of reading something on the internet without any way of checking it's veracity and posting it somewhere else as fact.

It's unfortunate that Bert Lloyd's word was always taken as fact.
I love Bert for the fantastic songs he created, he gave new life to many fogotten songs, but much of what he wrote and said about those songs was made up fake history.
It looks like he often had a theory on a song and when he couldn't find any proof he just made up his own facts to support his theory.
That's not how scholarship works...

In the end, he did us more good than harm, though, and it was actually quite entertaining to work out how his versions of songs like "St. James Hospital", "Reynardine", "The Recruited Collier" and many others came to be.

Part of me understands why he did this, he was probably torn between being a honest researcher and presenting his songs in the most appealing manner possible.
Claiming "I learned this song from an old lady in our village, it goes back to pre-christian times" or something fancy like that is just a lot more interesting than simply saying "I created this song myself by rewritting bits and pieces I found in old books, it is not an authentic text from oral tradition".