"Liege & Lief" was promoted by John Peel on his "Top Gear" radio programme and the album spent fifteen weeks in the UK album chart, reaching number 17. In a contemporary review, John Mendelsohn of "Rolling Stone" recommended the album only to devotees of "quietly arty traditional folk" and felt that "Deserter" is the only "arresting" song, as "not even the originals match up to the group-composed material on previous albums." Robert Christgau of "The Village Voice" was less enthusiastic, writing that because of his "anti-folk" tastes, he was disappointed with the album's more traditional material after "Unhalfbricking".