Vaughan Williams’s lifelong association with the English Folk Revival presents an unexpected paradox. Despite his substantial experience as a folk-song collector, holding leading positions in major Revival institutions, composing and arranging music for its performances and producing groundbreaking writings on theory, his contribution – if it is acknowledged at all – is reduced to the view that he was an establishment figure who simply continued the ideas of Cecil Sharp. This caricature of the man and his work – a cypher with nothing original to say and a toff unable to relate to working-class singers – is not only wrong but ignores all available evidence. Benefitting from recent republications of his own writings and new scholarship following the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this chapter positions Vaughan Williams as a tempering influence on the more dubious aspects of the Folk Revival. From his first day as a collector, his methods and approaches were advanced for their time. And while supporting the value of Sharp’s aim of revival, Vaughan Williams’s letters and actions show he directly challenged Sharp’s authoritarian and unsound assumptions. An undogmatic, respectful, and humane observer of the traditional music he encountered, Vaughan Williams still has much to offer to contemporary folk-song researchers.

Commentators on Britten tend to view him as unreceptive to folk song; or if mildly sympathetic, as treating it in isolation from the mainstream of the English Folk Revival. While he steered clear of the revivalist ‘hard line’ represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp, he nonetheless engaged creatively with an ‘alternative’ revival embodied by Percy Grainger and the song collectors Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood. This chapter considers Britten’s folk-song arrangements and essays to demonstrate his debt to this ‘forgotten’ tradition of folk-song research. His editorial handling of folk song is examined in light of its theories, while his personal links to Violet Alford, E. J. Moeran, Francesca Allinson, William Plomer, and W. H. Auden – figures who expressed similarly capacious views of ‘folk process’ – are discussed. The emerging ‘heritage movement’ of the 1930s and 1940s, whereby English cultural ‘insularity’ became a source of national celebration and artistic focus, is also assessed. These influences suggest an unsuspected role for folk song in Britten’s construction of a cosmopolitan ‘Englishness’ rooted in the local and the particular.