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 - Foreign Affairs   Royalty - Praise  

Showing 1 to 20 of 30

1 A proper new Ballad, intituled, The wandring Prince of Troy [Pepys 1.84-85]
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]
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]
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]
21 A True Relation of the Life and Death of/ Sir Andrew Barton, a Pyrate and Rover on the Seas [Pepys 1.484-85]
22 The Spanish Ladies Love [Euing 340]
27 A Pleasant Song of the Valiant Deeds of Chivalry,/ Atchieved by that Noble Knight Sir Guy of Warwick [Roxburghe 3.50-1]
31 The SUCCESS of/ Two English Travellers;/ Newly Arrived in London [Pepys 2.232]
32 The Seamans Song of Captain Ward the famous Pyrate of the world, and an/ English man born [Euing 327]
33 The most Rare and Excellent History,/ Of the Dutchess of Suffolks Callamity [Euing 228]
45 A pleasant new Ballad of the Miller of Mansfield, in Sherwood and of King Henry the second [Roxburghe 1.228-29]
46 A lamentable Ballad of a Combat lately performed neere London,/ betwixt Sir James Steward, and Sir George Wharton  [Euing 195]
47 THE/ Lord RUSSELS/ Last Farewel to the World [Huntington HEH 18016]
51 The Loyal English Man's WISH/ For the Preservation of/ The King and Queen [Pepys 5.63]
56 A CARROUSE/ TO THE/ Emperour, the Royal Pole,/ And the much-wrong'd DUKE of LORRAIN [Roxburghe 4.2]
57 The Shepherd and the King, and of Gillian the Shepherds Wife, with her churlish Answer [Euing 332]
62 The Honour of a London Prentice [Pepys 3.252]
72 A Lamentable Ballad of Fair Rosamond, King Henry the Second’s Concubine,/ Who was put to death by Queen Elinor, in Woodstock Bower near Oxford [Pepys 1.498-99]

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