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.

Politics - Domestic   Emotions - Anxiety  

Showing 1 to 20 of 41

2 A Memorable Song on the unhappy hunting in Chevy-Chase, between Earl/ Piercy of England, and Earl Dowglas of Scotland [Roxburghe 3.66-67]
3 The Catholick Ballad:/ OR AN/ INVITATION/ TO/ POPERY [Euing 24]
4 A lamentable Dittie composed upon the death of/ Robert Lord Devereux late Earle of Essex, who was beheaded in the/ Tower of London, upon Ashwednesday in the morning [Huntington Britwell 18290]
5 The Ballad of the CLOAK:/ Or, The Cloaks Knavery [Pepys 2.218]
6 A most sweet Song of an English Merchant,/ borne at Chichester [Roxburghe 1.104-05]
7 THE/ Sale of Esau's Birth-right;/ OR,/ The New Buckingham Ballad [Crawford 3537]
8 A NEW SONG [Pepys 4.312]
11 THE/ Rare Vertue of an Orange;/ Or, Popery purged and expelled out of the Nation [Pepys 2.259]
12 The True LOYALIST/; OR,/ The Obedient SUBJECT,/ A Loyal SONG [Pepys 2.223]
15 The Lamentable and Tragicall History of Titus An-/dronicus [Folger L252a]
16 The Lamenting Ladies last farewel to the/ WORLD [Euing 183]
19 A Pleasant Ballad of Tobias, wherein is shewed/ what wonderful things chanced to him in his Youth [Euing 270]
26 The Whig Rampant:/OR, EXALTATION [Euing 389]
30 The Delights of the Bottle;/ OR,/ The Town-Gallants Declaration for Women and Wine [Euing 71]
31 The SUCCESS of/ Two English Travellers;/ Newly Arrived in London [Pepys 2.232]
40 A Pleasant new Ballad betweene King Edward the fourth, and a Tan-/ner of Tamworth [Roxburghe 1.176-77]
41 The Woful Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore, a Goldsmiths Wife/ in London, sometime King Edward the Fourth's Concubine [Euing 394]
42 An Excellent Ballad of Patient Grissel [Euing 85]
45 A pleasant new Ballad of the Miller of Mansfield, in Sherwood and of King Henry the second [Roxburghe 1.228-29]
47 THE/ Lord RUSSELS/ Last Farewel to the World [Huntington HEH 18016]

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