Rumoured to have begun compiling it in response to one of his Scottish employees joking that England had no national music worth studying, William Chappell’s A Collection of English National Airs (1838–40, RCINs 1050271-2) was an attempt to survey the folk song traditions of England through history. The son of the music publisher Samuel Chappell, William developed a passion for music from a young age. He was involved in antiquarian societies that focused on the history of music and developed a wide-ranging knowledge of the cultural context of popular song through the study of plays, poems, broadsides, miscellanies, dance manuals, instruction books and little-known manuscripts. Using these, he gathered together a host of songs that he argued had their origins in English traditions and by arranging the work chronologically, he attempted to find common themes in English folk song. Such a task was difficult due to the lack of evidence, but Chappell was careful to state whenever he had to speculate.
Chappell wrote during a period where it was presumed that many popular songs, particularly those that had been published in Scottish dialect, had their origins in Scotland. However, he noted that many of the songs popular among Scottish balladeers had their origins in earlier English sources but that they had hitherto been neglected from serious study due to a lack of interest among English scholars. This provoked a harsh reaction from Scottish writers who viewed such songs as important parts of their national identity.
Chappell continued to gather and edit his research over the next two decades, publishing this, his seminal Popular Music of the Olden Time in seventeen parts from 1855 to 1859. By this time, however, his research methods had come under criticism from a new generation of antiquarians studying national song. Chappell preferred to gather his information from written source material in order to see how song and melody had changed over time and to record tunes that had fallen from favour. The new generation, most prominent of whom was perhaps Cecil Sharp, argued that this was inauthentic and that the true character of song came directly from ‘the folk’. Sharp told his students to ignore Chappell’s ‘record of the printed music of the past’ and instead to go ‘direct to peasant singers themselves’ or from sources that had recorded the song first-hand. Nevertheless, both Sharp and his contemporary Sabine Baring-Gould referred to Chappell when they were looking to understand the history of a particular song.

Source material:
Steve Roud, Folk Song in England, (London: Faber & Faber, 2017)