It wasn’t the German musicologist Carl Engel who coined the mocking phrase Das Land ohne Musik. That was another German, Oskar Schmitz, but Engel did indicate a glaring gap in England’s musical landscape during Victoria’s heyday. ‘It seems rather singular,’ he wrote in 1879,

At that very time a resistance movement, chronicled by Steve Roud in his book Folk Song in England, was brewing among British composers who were sick of what they regarded as their countrymen’s xenophilia for Mendelssohn and Wagner. The ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was the label pinned on this group which included Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Alexander Mackenzie. And although they had no interest in folk music – their concerns were symphonic – they regarded folk music as so useful to their nationalist cause that all three became vice-presidents of the Folk-Song Society when it was founded in 1898.

The notion of an oral folk-song tradition in England had taken root during the nineteenth century. Thomas Hardy, writing down such snatches of old ballads as he could glean from aged singers, was one of many amateur collectors of songs from the countryside (songs from the cities would remain overlooked for several decades longer). But the first English folk-song collector in the modern sense of the term was John Broadwood, grandson of the founder of the piano-making firm, who published a book of sixteen songs in 1847 entitled Old English Songs as now Sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. According to his niece Lucy Broadwood, who was a pioneering collector and founder of the Folk-Song Society, John Broadwood ‘had an extremely accurate musical ear … and was before his time in sympathising with the dialect, music, and customs of country-folk.