A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad

A fairly thorough search for information about a singer named Tom Cook of Eastbridge, Suffolk, has yielded nothing so far. According to the traditional discography maintained by Rod Stradling in Musical Traditions magazine, no recordings of such a singer have ever been issued (Stradling 2004). Although there was a well-known Cook family in Eastbridge, members of which Lloyd did record, there is no mention of a Tom Cook outside of Lloyd's and Sedley's writings. Furthermore, negative evidence from Keith Summers, who documented Suffolk traditional music in the 1960s and 1970s, also casts doubt on the Sedley attribution. Having checked all his notes about the Eastbridge area, Summers reported that the following Cooks had been interviewed by him or mentioned by his informants: "Albert (Diddy), Harry (Crutter), Syd and Walter. But no Tom." He added, "I have never heard ['Reynardine'] sung in this area or even mentioned by any singer or informant" (pers. comm. 17 March 2002). No other researcher working in Suffolk seems to have encountered either a singer called Tom Cook or the "Reynardine" ballad.

The fact that it has not proved possible to track down any singer in Eastbridge called Tom Cook or to find any other version of "Reynardine" from the area raises serious questions about the accuracy or even integrity of Lloyd's declarations about the sources of some of his songs and his claims to have collected them from oral tradition. Indeed, Lloyd's claims about the origins of his songs are widely regarded with suspicion these days, both in revival circles and within English folksong scholarship.

Serious questioning of Lloyd's scholarship began shortly after his death (Meredith 1983, 13-15). More recently, Vic Gammon has written that Lloyd's "unashamed love of the material made him a reassembler and tinkerer," a trait he combined with "poor documentation" and "selective" use of evidence (Gammon 1986, 148-53). Dave Arthur is more specific, stating:

   One finds in [Lloyd's] manuscripts informants' names crossed out and
   changed, unverifiable dates and places credited, and in the case of
   "One of the Has Beens," a very specific note. "I heard this from a
   Vaudeville actor, in hospital in Cowra, NSW, on New Year's Day," was
   changed on publication to "a teamster from Grenfell sang the song,"
   which sounds more "authentic" than "a vaudeville actor" (Arthur
   1999, 12).

In short, there is a fairly general consensus that Lloyd's desire to claim the authenticity of tradition for folksongs overcame his memory (or his honesty) on some occasions.

The most prominent example of this involves a song Lloyd called "The Recruited Collier" (Roud 1994b, no. 3503), whose fate in Lloyd's hands has resonances for my discussion of the ballad "Reynardine" in this article. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lloyd, a member of the British Communist Party, was politically committed to the idea of "industrial folk song." [3] In 1951, under the auspices of the National Coal Board, he sought examples of miners' industrial songs by running a contest, which he publicised to colliers through an industry magazine and newsreel film. In the book that resulted from that effort, Lloyd claimed that a man named J. T. Huxtable contacted him with a song he called "The Recruited Collier" (Lloyd 1952, 133).