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.

Royalty - Praise   Society - Old/young  

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]
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]
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]
33 The most Rare and Excellent History,/ Of the Dutchess of Suffolks Callamity [Euing 228]
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]
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]
49 A constant Wife, a kinde Wife,/ A loving Wife, and a fine Wife [Pepys 1.390-91]
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]
68 Poor Robin's Dream, commonly call'd, Poor Charity [Euing 285]
76 Saint Georges commendation to all Souldiers [Pepys 1.87]

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