Penny Merriments
Street Songs of 17th Century England
‘Ballads! My masters, ballads!
Will you ha’ o’ the newest and truest matter in all
London?
I have of them for all choices, and over all
arguments too.
Here be your story-ballads, your love-ballads,
and your ballads of good-life’.
The songs on this recording were the pop music of
their day. Churned out by anonymous hacks, often
working from dingy rooms at the back of London’s
print shops, they were printed in their thousands on
crude penny broadsheets and known as Broadside
Ballads. Sung, whistled and hummed in all walks of
life they were as likely to be bought for domestic
entertainment or heard on the London stage as pasted
up on the wall of a country tavern.
Broadside ballads were very much an urban means
of expression, a mass form of communication before
the days of newspapers and magazines that reported on
just about every aspect of life. Here we read of
historical events like the Great Fire of London, the
Spanish Armada and the longed-for return of Charles
II; of bygone heroes, tradesmen, notorious criminals,
the passing of the seasons and the fear of death. Like
today’s tabloid press, ballads also offered
sensationalism—lively, lusty tales of sexual exploits,
jilted suitors, shrewish wives and fumbling husbands.
There is comedy too, with stories of Peeping Toms,
not-so-innocent maids and country bumpkins (a
popular butt of jokes throughout the century), and a
plethora of pastoral characters whose amorous
adventures no doubt satisfied the new city-dwellers’
nostalgia for their own rural heritage.
Broadside ballads were the direct descendants of
the long folk ballads of the Middle Ages. Their heyday
was the seventeenth century, between the reigns of
Elizabeth I and William and Mary, and although those
recorded here are taken from broadsheets dating from
the Restoration period, many were already widely
known through oral tradition, finding their way onto
the printed page as publishing became cheaper and
literacy more widespread. Interestingly some were to
drift back into the oral tradition again, only to be
‘rediscovered’, albeit often in altered form, by the
great song-collectors of the early twentieth century
such as Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams.
The musical arrangements here reflect a variety of
settings where ballads were performed. A theatre
might employ a small mixed band to play between the
acts, often accompanying a singer or two in a comic
interlude complete with ‘scurrilous songs and obscene
gestures’; a ballad singer with, perhaps, a fiddle or
cittern might find an appreciative audience in a
crowded street or the dark corner of a local tavern; the
newly fashionable Coffee Houses were notorious for
providing lusty male part-singing; while across the
river in Southwark, London’s infamous red-light
district, the doxies would entice customers with ‘a ripe
selection of filthy songs’.
Most people, though, would have heard the latest
broadside ballad from the mouth of an itinerant pedlar,
a rough singing professional who, unlike the old
minstrels of the pre-Elizabethan era—a respected breed
of musicians whose lineage could be traced back to the
old Medieval bards—rarely had any musical skills.
Some of them would be trained up for just a few weeks
by the printers and sent off around the country ‘with a
dozen groatsworth of ballads’ on a sale-or-return
basis; others were simply ‘idle youths who, loathing
honest labour and lawful trades, betook themselves to
vagrant life, singing and selling ballads full of ribaldry
and scurrilous vanity’.
With such a coarse company of performers all
sorts of tricks were needed to entice customers. A good
picture was always an attraction and the majority of
broadsheets contain crude woodcut illustrations.
Demand always exceeded supply so printers would
buy in a job lot of old worm-eaten cuts and use them
again and again regardless of whether or not they bore
any relation to the accompanying text.
Many ballads described topical events much like
newspapers so a quick turn-around was vital. It was said
that ‘scarcely a cat could look out of a gutter but out
started a halfpenny chronicler, and presently a proper
new ballad about it was indited’ . Broadsheets
frequently printed the ‘last words’ of some notorious
criminal about to be hanged even before he’d uttered
them and, if an earthquake or fire frightened Londoners
on one day, the next morning saw the publication of at
least one ballad describing the disaster and urging
people to repent before the next.
Out on the road the resourcefulness of the pedlarcum-ballad-singer knew no bounds. With his pack
stuffed full of broadsheets, ribbons, buttons and general
knick-knacks, he would travel the length and breadth of
the country doing business at fairs, market places, bearbaitings
and taverns, and sometimes even in a large
country house where a well-to-do family would be
eager to purchase a copy of the latest hit song from the
London stage. Having established his patch, he would
begin his song. As the crowd became involved in the
story he might stop halfway through announcing that if
they wanted to hear the rest, they must purchase a copy.
Other sources describe singers working in league with
gangs of thieves. Perched on top of a barrel the singer
would have a good view of his audience and stop for a
moment to warn them to watch out for pickpockets.
Instinctively everyone would pat the side of their belts
that held their leather money pouches; the eagle-eyed
cutpurses would take note and, as the singing resumed,
speedily relieve them of their cash.
Broadsheets rarely contain any musical notation
since most of the tunes were already familiar favourites
or at least catchy enough to be learned from the ballad
singer on first hearing. Instead they offer instructions
like ‘To the tune of Wolsey’s Wilde’ or, even more
frustrating for us today, ‘To a new Northern tune’.
Connecting tunes to texts, therefore, often requires quite
a bit of detective work, particularly since publishers
were in the habit of renaming an old tune after the title
of the latest or most popular ballad to which it had been
sung. Playford’s The Dancing Master (eighteen editions
between 1651 and 1728) is a good source of tunes;
others can be found in a handful of song collections, in
particular Thomas Durfey’s ‘Wit and Mirth or Pills To
Purge Melancholy’ (six volumes published between
1698–1720). The ballad operas of the eighteenth century
are another valuable storehouse, most notably John
Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera 1727/8 in which more than
sixty songs are set to common broadside ballad tunes. In
addition, Claude M. Simpson in his monumental book
The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (1966)
reconnects over five hundred ballads to their original
tunes, many of which only survive within arrangements
for harpsichord, lute or viol consort.
The broadside ballads performed here have been
selected from sources including the Pepys Collection
(Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge), the
Euing Collection (University of Glasgow), the Bagford
Collection (British Library), the Roxburghe Collection
(begun by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, 1661–1724))
now in the British Library and Durfey’s Pills To Purge
Melancholy.
Lucie Skeaping