Many ballad scholars, including F. J. Child, Cecil Sharp, G. L. Kittredge, Gordon Gerould and David Buchan have vigourously agreed with Mrs Hogg's emphasis on the essential orality of the ballad form, and some have deplored the inimical effect of print upon the ballad tradition. Child famously referred to printed ballads as ‘veritable dunghills in which, only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel’, and many twentieth-century scholars have made far-reaching claims about the dramatic changes wrought upon Western culture by the advent of print – some waxing elegiac about the oral or ‘preliterate’ ‘lifeworld’ and, in common with Albert Lord, viewing the realms of oral and print culture as fundamentally opposed. Yet, far from being antithetical to oral tradition, the printed ballad has played a central role in traditional and popular song, in Britain since at least the sixteenth century, and in Ireland since the eighteenth, having been approved by the lettered and the unlettered alike. Judging not only from the repertoire that has come down into recent oral tradition, but also from the records we possess of what people sang later in the period, eighteenth-century Irish traditional singers embraced the printed ballad; and, while it was long a truism in folksong scholarship that print stultifies the process of recreation and variation, the Irish example illustrates this has patently not been the case.