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.

Queen Elizabeth   Couple With Leafy Fan   Bodleian Library, Oxford University  

Showing 1 to 4 of 4

28 A most excellent Song of the love of young Palmus, and faire Sheldra, with their unfortunate love [Pepys 1.350-51]
37 The lamentable Ditty of Little Mousgrove,/ and the Lady Barnet [Pepys 1.364-65]
41 The Woful Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore, a Goldsmiths Wife/ in London, sometime King Edward the Fourth's Concubine [Euing 394]
107 A good Wife, or none [Roxburghe 1.140-41]