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.

Bodies - Health/sickness   Society - Old/young  

Showing 1 to 20 of 28

1 A proper new Ballad, intituled, The wandring Prince of Troy [Pepys 1.84-85]
11 THE/ Rare Vertue of an Orange;/ Or, Popery purged and expelled out of the Nation [Pepys 2.259]
13 The rarest Ballad that ever was seen,/ Of the Blind beggers daughter of Bednall-green [Euing 293]
19 A Pleasant Ballad of Tobias, wherein is shewed/ what wonderful things chanced to him in his Youth [Euing 270]
27 A Pleasant Song of the Valiant Deeds of Chivalry,/ Atchieved by that Noble Knight Sir Guy of Warwick [Roxburghe 3.50-1]
30 The Delights of the Bottle;/ OR,/ The Town-Gallants Declaration for Women and Wine [Euing 71]
34 The Brides Buriall [Roxburghe 1.59]
38 A worthy example of a vertuous wife, who fed her father with her own milk [Roxburghe 3.48-49]
39 An Hundred Godly Lessons,/ That a Mother on her Death-Bed gave to her Children [Pepys 2.16-17]
43 Save a Theefe from the Gallowes and hee'l hang thee if he can [Manchester Central Library Blackletter Ballads 1.56]
44 The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth, who being enforced by her Parents to wed him against/ her will, did most wickedly consent to his murther [Pepys 1.126-27]
49 A constant Wife, a kinde Wife,/ A loving Wife, and a fine Wife [Pepys 1.390-91]
53 The Dead Mans Song,/ Whose dwelling was neere unto Bassings Hall in London [Roxburghe 1.72-73]
67 A new Ditty, shewing the wonderfull Miracles of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ [Pepys 1.58]
68 Poor Robin's Dream, commonly call'd, Poor Charity [Euing 285]
74 Ann Askew, intituled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind [Pepys 2.24-25]
83 The dying tears of a true Lover forsaken,/ Made on his Death=bed [Euing 64]
85 A new Ballad, intituled, The stout Cripple of Cornwal [Euing 242]
86 A most excellent Ballad, of an old man and his wife, who in great want and misery sought to/ Children for succour, by whom they were disdained [Pepys 1.43]
87 New Mad Tom of Bedlam / OR,/ The Man in the Moon drinks Clarret [Pepys 1.502-03]

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