Ralph Vaughan Williams after Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli are Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. Record companies with extensive lists of Vaughan Williams recordings include EMI, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion and Naxos. Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood at least once, and declined the post of Master of the King's Music after Elgar's death. The one state honour he accepted was the Order of Merit in 1935, which confers no prenominal title: he preferred to remain "Dr Vaughan Williams". His academic and musical honours included an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Oxford (1919); the Cobbett medal for
Vaughan Williams and English Folk Music Vaughan Williams" by Imogen Holst and Ursula Vaughan Williams was published in 1961. A large part of his collection has never been published. 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. Roy Palmer commented: "On the whole, Vaughan Williams was more interested in the song than the singer, in the melody than the message." He often failed to record the texts of songs, and when he did write down texts often recorded only the first verse. The text of one