Top pop from seventeenth-century England. Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here. See also User’s Guide.

Shirburn Ballads   William Andrews Clark Memorial Library  

Showing 1 to 14 of 14

1 A proper new Ballad, intituled, The wandring Prince of Troy [Pepys 1.84-85]
5 The Ballad of the CLOAK:/ Or, The Cloaks Knavery [Pepys 2.218]
7 THE/ Sale of Esau's Birth-right;/ OR,/ The New Buckingham Ballad [Crawford 3537]
9 A Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall [Roxburghe 3.148-49]
11 THE/ Rare Vertue of an Orange;/ Or, Popery purged and expelled out of the Nation [Pepys 2.259]
15 The Lamentable and Tragicall History of Titus An-/dronicus [Folger L252a]
18 An excellent Ballad of a Prince of England's Courtship to the/ King of France’s Daughter, and how the Prince was disasterously slain [Roxburghe 1.102-03]
35 The Judgement of God shewed upon one John Faustus/ Doctor in Divinity [Euing 145]
45 A pleasant new Ballad of the Miller of Mansfield, in Sherwood and of King Henry the second [Roxburghe 1.228-29]
52 England New Bell-man:/ Ringing into all peoples ears Gods dreadful/ Judgements against this Land and Kingdom [Bodleian Wood 401 (159v-160r)]
67 A new Ditty, shewing the wonderfull Miracles of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ [Pepys 1.58]
81 Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women./ By the Example of a strange Monster born of late in Germany [Euing 269]
83 The dying tears of a true Lover forsaken,/ Made on his Death=bed [Euing 64]
103 A Friends advice:/ In an excellent Ditty, concerning the variable Changes in this World [Roxburghe 1.116-17]

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