He collected his first song, Bushes and Briars, from Mr Charles Pottipher, a seventy-year-old labourer from Ingrave, Essex in 1903, and went on to collect over 800 songs, as well as some singing games and dance tunes.
For 10 years he devoted up to 30 days a year to collecting folk songs from singers in 21 English counties, though Essex, Norfolk, Herefordshire and Sussex account for over two thirds of the songs in his collection.
[4] Book 2 of Cecil Sharp's series "Folk Songs of England", titled "Folk-songs from the eastern counties" published in 1908, consisted of 15 songs from Vaughan Williams's collection, from Essex, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.
[6] In his final decade, Vaughan Williams revisited the folk-song with two large-scale choral anthologies: the 1949 Folk Songs of the Four Seasons, and The First Nowell in 1958.
[7] Roy Palmer commented: "On the whole, Vaughan Williams was more interested in the song than the singer, in the melody than the message."