Background to Ballads

What are broadside ballads?

Broadside ballads were popular songs, printed on one side of single sheet of paper, which sold for a penny or half-penny in Britain between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries Until recording technology allowed sound itself to be marketed, these cheap but lively prints provided the means for families at home or groups of people in taverns to amuse themselves with traditional, humorous, tragic, or political songs, sung to familiar tunes. Ephemeral printed objects like broadside ballads would not have survived without the efforts of collectors who treasured what other people considered merely momentary diversions.

The earliest ballad broadsides, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, contained a single song, but by the nineteenth century sheets bearing two songs were common, while larger sheets containing dozens of songs were sold either complete or as "slips", cut by the vendor according to the price paid. The ballad sellers on the street corners of towns or the pedlars who carried ballads in their packs provided literature to many in Great Britain who could not afford more expensive books.

The cheapness of ballad printing is reflected in the collage-like composition of the broadsides: to make up a full sheet, the printer would choose a text and sometimes an illustration -- though not necessarily an illustration made on purpose for that ballad. If the sheet was to contain more than one ballad, the printer decided which songs to include from the thousands available without copyright. The results will be seen by any user of this database; a single ballad text may appear in many different ballad sheets, juxtaposed with different companion ballads. The same may be said for the woodcut illustrations: a woodcut intended to illustrate one ballad might be used later alongside a different song. These characteristics of broadside ballad publishing have influenced the approach to cataloguing the broadside ballads in this database. The individual ballads and the illustrations are treated as entities within the envelope of the complete broadside sheet. Therefore both broadside sheets and the individual ballads contained in them are searchable.

The history of broadside ballads

Broadside ballads occupy an important place in the history of print, the literary tradition, and the popular culture of Britain. As literature they presented, in verse form, texts drawn from the widest range of sources, including medieval romance, bible stories, and current events. The illustrations of ballad broadsides, like their texts, depicted scenes from the supernatural to the mundane, delivering messages about religion, morals, and social status in a visual shorthand. Most importantly, the broadside ballads were the cheapest printed materials available in Britain until the nineteenth century.

In retrospect, the topical ballad of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has gained importance as a precursor of the newspaper. Britain's rulers were suspicious of ballads which might inflame anti-government feeling, but on the other hand official propaganda could be disseminated cheaply through printed broadsides. From the disputes which culminated in the Civil War to the Glorious Revolution in 1688, ballads provided a running commentary on the major political issues of the day. Some of these political ballads, particularly of the later seventeenth century and eighteenth century, were clearly directed at an audience already "in the know" about the personalities and issues involved; the lack of illustrations on the satirical political ballads from this period suggests that they were directed at a smaller and more elite audience. Topical ballads did not die out after 1700, but those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must be read in the context of the growth of newspapers. Ballads were clearly allocated the function of commenting, usually satirically, on events and famous people rather than presenting new information..

Topical ballads on other subjects suffered from justifiable suspicion about their accuracy. Many purporting to deliver "shocking news" were fakes, and a tale of disastrous flood, earthquake, or Act of God might be reprinted several times with the location and the names of individuals changed to make the story seem new.

Executions of criminals were a favourite subject of the topical ballad, and the execution broadside or "last words" of the condemned was a recognized genre, often including a prose description of the crime and the last hours of the criminal alongside verses expressive of his or her repentance on the gallows.

Ballads of love, adventure, and comedy were intended to entertain and amuse. The texts of these ballads might be very old. Since the beginning of scholarly interest in ballads during the eighteenth century, the distinction has been drawn, however imprecisely, between "traditional" ballads and modern productions. Certainly many of the broadside ballads refer to tales of chivalry and romance with medieval roots; sometimes the ballad text itself was reprinted faithfully down the generations. On the other hand were songs of "the times", which referred to the latest fashions and used the latest slang. Finally, another part of the ballad market was satisfied with the love songs, often employing pastoral imagery, which flourished during the Restoration period and returned in a new guise as the "drawing-room ballads", fit for family consumption, of Victorian England. With little narrative and repetitive verses, these were best suited for a pleasing private performance on the piano.

The production of this cheap literature was a good business for some printers, who sold thousands of prints by distributing more "new" or sensational songs each week. Sometimes these were not so new; old ballads were adapted or reprinted literatim. Ballads of contrasting appeal were even printed on the same sheet, to gain the widest audience.

Paradoxically, ballads were the last form of print to give up the "black letter" or Gothic type, as late as the end of the seventeenth century, and the reuse of old woodcuts gave many ballad broadsides a traditional, even antiquated, look. Printers' reluctance to abandon the black letter may have been due to the prejudices of popular readers or to the cheapness of old type, but during the eighteenth century, they saw the possibility of a niche market in the development of antiquarian interest in ballads. Publishers colluded with scholars in promoting the ballad form as the traditional popular literature of Britain, emphasising the antiquity of the ballad tales as a positive quality, ratifying otherwise dubious verses with the veneer of age.

Sellers and buyers of ballads

Evidence of the movement of ballads after they left the printing house is anecdotal; no shops kept records of the numbers of ballads sold, and the surviving copies we have reflect the tastes of the literary gentlemen and antiquarians who collected broadside ballads, often to the bemusement of their contemporaries. Some ballad sellers were well-known figures in certain towns, and evidence from art and literature may be added to the memoirs of individuals to give an impression of the role ballads played in public and private life.

Ballad sellers were street vendors who sang the new songs as they stood or strolled along. Although some were supposed to make a meagre living, the evidence from Hogarth's prints of eighteenth-century tavern life is that ballad-selling was a form of begging, and indeed some ballad sheets were specially printed with a message describing the seller as an unemployed collier, or veteran soldier, deserving of charity. In Charles Dickens's novel, Our Mutual Friend, the character Silas Wegg is a one-legged man who sells ballads at a street-corner stall before being hired (as a reader) by the honest but illiterate Boffin.

The cheapness of the ballad sheets suggests that they could have reached an audience as large as the literate population. Even the illiterate might have heard a ballad being sung and seen the illustrations on the page. However, the low price did not exclude wealthier buyers, and the collections surviving in libraries today were compiled by antiquarians and scholars who valued the popular prints of their own day alongside more expensive books.

Ballads were associated in literature with country life and traditional pastimes. The heroine of Fanny Burney's novel, The Wanderer, is touched by a scene of rustic tranquillity when she finds a grandmother singing the song of the Children in the Wood to her grandchildren, who respond with heartfelt tears to the plight of the babes abandoned by their cruel uncle.

On the other hand, Peter Burke has suggested that a common ballad subject, the tribulations of the countryman in town, would have appealed to the many rural migrants who arrived in large cities, especially London, during these centuries. In the opening page of Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, we see one such migrant, the future mayor, perusing a ballad sheet as he strides along the dusty road to Casterbridge.

© Bodleian Library 1999