Methodology: Identifying seventeenth-century super-songs
Millions of broadside ballads were published in London during the ‘long’ seventeenth century upon which this website concentrates (1557-1711).[1] Of these, around 10,000 examples have been preserved, representing a very small percentage of the original total.[2] These songs owe their survival to the fact that they were purchased and stored by one or more of the usually wealthy and highly educated men who adopted the hobby of ballad-collecting in the years between 1550 and 1800 (see the essay on Collectors and collections). Our sources have therefore been filtered by privileged persons, making it extremely difficult to establish which of the many ballads that were published deserve recognition as the chart-topping ‘hits’ of their era. To make matters worse, the records kept by those who worked in the early-modern publishing industry are rather thin, and there are certainly no sales figures for us to consider.
Despite these difficulties, it is important that we think about early modern printed materials in terms of their relative popularity and commercial success.[3] The nascent pop song industry surely churned out ballads in a combination of occasional hits and frequent misses, just as its modern counterpart does (see The ballad business). We should not treat all seventeenth-century ballads as equally significant; instead, it is logical to suppose that some sold in their thousands and lasted for years while others passed swiftly into oblivion as pie-wrappers and bum-wipers. For this reason, our website is driven by a wish to provide for study and discussion a ranked list of seventeenth-century super-songs, a ‘hit parade’ from the age of Shakespeare and Milton. Our focus on popularity has led us to concentrate on ballads that were printed in black-letter (gothic) type because this was the font that was most familiar to most people in the period.[4] Some of the ballads that appear on this site were also published in white-letter (Roman) type but nearly all of our 120 songs appeared at least once in a black-letter version (the three exceptions have been included because their tunes proved exceptionally popular for black-letter songs, even though the original ballads are only known to have been published in white-letter format). The situation is further complicated by the fact that, at the end of the seventeenth century, the distinction between black- and white-letter publication was in the process of breaking down.
In order to build our chart of hit songs, a multi-stranded methodology was devised. It must be conceded at the outset that certainty is impossible because of the paucity of evidence, and we therefore aspire to provide a list of super-songs that is plausible rather than conclusive. Having said this, indicators of popularity exist in surprising variety and, reassuringly, they tend to reinforce one another by drawing our attention repeatedly to the same songs. These indicators are discussed in detail below but an initial summary may be useful here:
In order to ensure that the website features a combination of long-lived songs, short-term hits and ballads that can be adjudged highly successful on other grounds, we proceeded by devising three separate lists (see below). On each list, points were awarded according to over-lapping but variant criteria drawn from those summarised above: List A highlights songs that remained successful for many years; List B concentrates on ballads that enjoyed conspicuous but short-term success; and List C prioritises songs that generated new tune titles. The evidence is probably fullest for List A, followed by Lists B and C in that order. For this reason, List A is the longest of the three at 77 ballads, while Lists B and C include 32 and 11 songs respectively. When the three lists were complete, we merged them to create our consolidated list of 120 ballads. For each song, the ‘popularity’ box identifies the list under which the title has qualified for inclusion.
It can be said with confidence that all of the songs on this website were highly successful. It cannot be said, however, that all other songs were necessarily unsuccessful; it seems likely that some highly influential songs have been missed by our methodology (for example, the hit Royalist anthem, The King enjoyes his own again, is not included because its print history is surprisingly unimpressive). It would also be unwise to place too much weight on the relative placement of the ballads within the consolidated list. There were clearly big differences in commercial success between the top ten songs and the bottom ten, but we are not confident about the significance of finer gradations. Song 47 may not, for example, have been markedly more successful than song 48. The underlying evidence simply is not strong enough to bear overly ambitious interpretation. Having sounded these notes of caution, we are nevertheless confident that this website presents 120 songs that were amongst the greatest hits of their age.
List A: Long-lasting super-songs
On three occasions in the seventeenth century, a group of England’s leading ballad publishers - known as the Ballad Partners - worked collaboratively to block-register what they presumably considered to be the most successful and reliable titles (see the Ballad Business essay). In 1624, the founding partnership consisted of Thomas Pavier, John Wright, Cuthbert Wright, Edward Wright, John Grismond and Henry Gosson. The 1656 partners were Francis Coles, John Wright, Thomas Vere and William Gilbertson. And in 1675, the men involved were Francis Coles, Thomas Vere, John Wright and John Clark. These three important lists of successful songs have been supplemented by a record of the ballads that were held in stock by William Thackeray in 1689. Thackeray was a successor to the individuals listed above and was well-known as one of the dominant publishers of cheap print during the later seventeenth century. Taken together, these four lists enable us to build up a new litany of super-songs.[10]
We have worked through these documents to produce a list of ballad titles that appear repeatedly in these sources (either two, three or four times). In the absence of any reliable sales figures, it seems logical to regard the presence of a title within our selection of songs as a strong indicator of its commercial success (a method that was applied to religious ballads by Tessa Watt, though she did not look much beyond the 1624 list).[11] Reassuringly, there is a strong correlation between ballads that appeared repeatedly in the publishers’ lists and ballads that survive in unusually plentiful numbers. Ballads that appear on three or four of the lists survive, on average, at the rate of 8.8 copies per title. Songs that appear on two lists survive at the rate of 6.1 copies per title. In contrast, ballads that appeared on only one or none of the lists but that were nevertheless registered with the Stationers’ Company on at least 2 occasions during the period manage an average survival rate of only 2.6 per title. Beneath this level, there were many ballads that have either survived in single copies or that have not survived at all (a high number of the songs that were listed in the Stationers’ Registers no longer exist).
Ballads are included in List A as a result of their appearance in these publishers’ records. Once the songs had been identified in this way, various other criteria were applied in order to provide a broader evidential base. Points were awarded to individual songs both for references in the publishers’ lists and for these other criteria, and the results can be read in the ‘popularity’ boxes. The scoring system for List A can be summarised as follows (the asterisk identifies the most important criterion for the purposes of List A):
First figure: the appearance of the title in the Shirburn ballads - 2 points.
*Second figure: appearances on the Ballad Parters' lists - 10 points for 2 references; 20 points for 3 references; 30 points for 4 references; and an additional 10 points for appearances on the 1624 list (this compensates for the fact that the publishers’ information is heavily dominated by songs from the second half of the seventeenth century).
Third figure: other appearances in the Stationers’ Registers - 5 points per entry.
Fourth figure: the number of known editions - 2 points per edition.
Fifth figure: the number of surviving copies from all editions: 1 point for each.
Sixth figure: the number of new titles for old tunes generated by the ballad - 2 points for every subsequent ballad that used a tune-name deriving from the song in question, up to a maximum of 30 points.
Seventh figure: evidence that woodcut pictures were specially commissioned to illustrate the ballad - 5 points for each example.
Eighth figure: the number of references in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases, provided that the total is higher than ten - the number of points has been calculated by dividing the total number of references by ten and then rounding up or down to the nearest whole unit. In order to prevent distortion, a maximum number of 15 points has been imposed.
It is a strange but reassuring fact that one distinct section of Samuel Pepys’ collection seems to concentrate particularly on long-lasting hits, just as our List A does. Pepys’ first volume of ballads consists mainly of 232 songs published in the first few decades of the seventeenth century. Most of these were from John Selden’s collection, which Pepys subsequently acquired. The songs, mainly printed on full folio pages, are in larger format than most that were printed later in the century, when half-folios became the norm (see the Ballad Business essay). Pepys re-organised Selden’s ballads by thematic category, but essentially he kept the earlier collection together by pasting them into a single volume. At the end of this volume, however, we find a new section with the heading, ‘Small Promiscuous Supplement upon most of the foregoing subjects’. This presents forty ballads in the larger format of the early seventeenth century but actually published in the 1670s and 1680s, by which time half-folio ballads were dominant. Strikingly, twenty-nine of these forty songs also appear on our List A of long-lasting super-songs, and a further seven only just missed out on inclusion according to our criteria. It seems probable that the later publishers - nearly all members of the prestigious Ballad Partnership (see Ballad Business) - were deliberately issuing the songs they knew to be among their greatest hits in a retro format that they hoped would appeal to collectors and other consumers. Clearly, Pepys gathered these publications enthusiastically and pasted them into his first volume, where they shared space with the earlier ballads to which they were related. In an alternative and less probable scenario, the publishers issued many more retro ballads than are found at the back of Pepys’ first volume, but he or his agents deliberately selected the ‘classics’ for his collection. Either way, the extensive overlap between Pepys’ ‘Small Promiscuous Supplement’ and our own List A seems to suggest that our methodology may have put us on the right track.[12]
Sample 'popularity' score for a List A ballad (The Judgement of God shewed upon one John Faustus)
The scores for individual ballads from List A are presented in the 'popularity' boxes that appear on the page for each song. A typical example looks like this:
Shirburn ballads: no. XV.
Appearances on publishers' lists: Pavier and partners, 1624 (as 'Doctor Faustus'); Coles, Vere, Wright and Clarke, 1675; and Thackeray, 1689 ('Dr Faustus').
Other registrations with Stationers' Company: 1589.
No. of known editions c.1560-1711: 10
No. of extant copies: 9
New tune-titles generated: 'Doctor Faustus' (3 ballads).
Specially-commissioned woodcuts: none firmly established.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases: 8 references, with no evidence of later collection as a folk-song (Roud no. V28729).
POINTS: 2 + 30 + 5 + 20 + 9 + 6 + 0 + 0 = 72
List B: Topical hit songs that enjoyed short-term success
Ballads that earn a place on List A were typically built to last. Those on List B, in contrast, were more clearly ‘of the moment’. List B is our attempt to identify a selection of successful songs that dealt with specific contemporary events and provided commentary upon them. In other words, their significance was rooted in topicality. The construction of List B has involved a comprehensive examination of all the ballads that have survived from the seventeenth century. These have been carefully dated, drawing on all available evidence and scholarly writing, in order to identify songs that achieved conspicuous but comparatively short-term success, reflected in the publication of more than one edition within periods shorter than a decade in length. In compiling List B, we also decided to concentrate on ballads with subject matter that was chronologically situated (in other words, songs that were about specific individuals and events, rather than generic themes). It will be noticed that most of the songs that have made it into the chart via this route were on political topics. An attempt has also been made to ensure that there is at least one ballad from each of the decades in the seventeenth century. We were broadly successful in this, though we were unable to find suitably successful surviving songs to represent the 1610s and the 1640s (in both cases, a shortage of extant evidence was the main obstacle).
This combination of multiple editions within short periods and temporal specificity in terms of content earns ballads their place on List B. Once again, however, we have supplemented the information on short-term success with evidence relating to some of the other criteria outlined above. The scoring system looks like this (the asterisk identifies the most important criterion for the purposes of List B):
First figure: the number of known editions - 2 points per edition.
Second figure: the number of surviving copies from all editions - 1 point for each.
Third figure: appearances on the publishers’ lists - 10 points for each reference.
Fourth figure: other appearances in the Stationers’ Registers - 5 points per entry.
*Fifth figure: multiple editions within short periods - 6 points for each edition within a 3-year period; or, if no such periods can be identified, 4 points for each edition within a 10-year period.
Sixth figure: new titles for old tunes generated by the ballad - 2 points for every subsequent ballad that used a tune-name deriving from the song in question, up to a maximum of 30 points.
Seventh figure: evidence that woodcut pictures were specially commissioned to illustrate the ballad (5 points for each example).
Eighth figure: 20 points awarded to any ballad that is known to have appeared before 1640 (this is to compensate for low survival rates and the consequent domination of the data by later seventeenth-century evidence).
Sample 'popularity' score for a List B ballad (The Sale of Esau's Birth-right)
The scores for individual ballads from List B are presented in the 'popularity' boxes that appear on the page for each song. A typical example looks like this:
No. of known editions c.1560-1711: 8
No. of extant copies: 35
Appearances on publishers' lists: none.
Other registrations with Stationers' Company: none.
3-yr periods that produced multiple editions: 1679-81 (8)
New tune titles generated: none.
Specially-commissioned woodcuts: Barber shaving owl on featured edition.
Pre-1640 bonus: no.
POINTS: 16 + 35 + 0 + 0 + 48 + 0 + 5 + 0 = 104
List C: Additional ballads that generated new tune-titles
Here the emphasis is on the capacity of successful songs to encourage the adoption of new titles for existing tunes. Lists A and B happen to provide several examples of this process, and List C adds ten extra ballads that were particularly successful in generating fresh names for their melodies. As with the other lists, this evidence is further supported by consideration of additional criteria. For List C, our scoring system is as follows (the asterisk identifies the most important criterion for the purposes of List C) :
*First figure: new titles for old tunes generated by the ballad - 2 points for every subsequent ballad that uses a tune-name deriving from the song in question (for List C, no ceiling is set on the maximum number of points that can be awarded).
Second figure: appearances on the publishers’ lists - 10 points for each reference.
Third figure: other appearances in the Stationers’ Registers - 5 points per entry.
Fourth figure: the number of known editions - 2 points per edition.
Fifth figure: the number of surviving copies from all editions - 1 point for each.
Sixth figure: evidence that woodcut pictures were specially commissioned to illustrate the ballad - 5 points for each example.
Seventh figure: the number of hits in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases, provided that the total is higher than ten - in each case, the figure has then been divided by 10 and rounded up or down to the nearest whole unit. In order to prevent distortion, a maximum number of 15 points has been imposed.
Eighth figure: 20 points awarded to any ballad that is known to have appeared before 1640 - this is to compensate for low survival rates and the consequent domination of the data by later seventeenth-century evidence
Sample 'popularity' score for a List C ballad (The Lord RUSSELS Last Farewel to the World)
The scores for individual ballads from List C are presented in the 'popularity' boxes that appear on the page for each song. A typical example looks like this:
New tune titles deriving from the ballad: 'Russel's farewell' (28 ballads).
Appearances on publishers' lists: none.
Other registrations with Stationers' Company: none.
No. of known editions c.1560-1711: 2
No. of extant copies: 3
Specially-commissioned woodcuts: no known pictures but our featured edition includes musical notation (inaccurate but recognisable as the relevant tune).
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases: 2 references, with no evidence of later collection as a folk-song (Roud no. V29637).
Pre-1640 bonus: no.
POINTS: 56 + 0 + 0 + 4 + 3 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 63
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Whenever scores are tied within any one of our lists, the songs have been separated by working through the criteria, beginning with the most important (indicated by the asterisks above), until a winner emerges. We have used alphabetical order as a last resort when all scores are tied. When ballads from different lists are tied, we have placed titles from List A first, followed by those from Lists B and C.
This website presents an amalgamated ranking that combines each of the three lists described above. We constructed the three different systems for awarding points so that the averages on each list, and the range from the highest to the lowest score, would be roughly comparable (ballads on each of the lists score an average of 60-70 points, for example). Overall, we hope and believe that we have assembled a reliable collection of seventeenth-century super-songs that includes both short-term hits and long-lived classics, while incorporating texts, pictures and melodies in the underlying measurement of popularity.
Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane
[1] This period begins with the award of a royal charter to the Stationers’ Company and ends with the retirement or death of William Onley, printer, and a leading publisher of broadside ballads in London.
[2] This estimate is based on the total number of ballads appearing on the English Broadside Ballad Archive and Broadside Ballads Online from the Bodleian Libraries for the period under view.
[3] For thoughts on the popularity of printed products, see Tessa Watt, Cheap print and popular piety 1560-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in early modern England (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan top ten: defining print popularity in early modern England (Farnham, 2013).
[4] For a recent discussion of black-letter print, see Patricia Fumerton, The broadside ballad in early modern England. Moving media, tactical publics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), ch. 5.
[5] Edward Arber (ed.), A transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640, vol. 4 (London, 1877), pp. 93-94; G. E. B. Eyre and G. R. Rivington (eds.), A transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640-1708, vol. 2 (London, 1913), pp. 36-37 and 496-501; William Thackeray, ‘The present Adjustment and settlement of the stock’ (1689), published in facsimile in W. G. Day (ed.), The Pepys Ballads, vol. 5 (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 1987), pp. 439-54.
[6] Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1924; Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967).
[7] Andrew Clark (ed.), The Shirburn Ballads, 1585-1616 (Oxford, 1907).
[8] For points 4-8, the most useful and accessible sources are: the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/; Broadside Ballads Online from the Bodleian Libraries, http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/; the English Short Title Catalogue, (ESTC); and the Stationers’ Register Online, https://stationersregister.online/
[9] Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, https://www.vwml.org/
[10] See note 5, above.
[11] Watt, Cheap print and popular piety, part 1.
[12] For a different understanding of Pepys’ ‘Small Promiscuous Supplement’, see Fumerton, Broadside ballad, pp.158-59.