Recording: Prides fall
This song probably originated in the early seventeenth century – the handwritten version in the Shirburn ballads is dated 1609 - but nearly all of the printed copies that survive date from the period 1650-1710. There were numerous editions and this was clearly a well-known song. When, in 1628, John Earle wrote a satirical pen-portrait of ‘A pot poet’ (or hack writer), he described his target’s most frequent works as single-sheet ‘stories of some men of Tyburn, or a strange Monster out of Germany’. This may well have been a specific reference to Prides fall.
It has not so far been possible to connect the ballad with a particular case, and the variability of the ballad-makers’ geographical referencing – the mother was ‘a Dutch-land Vrou [frau]’ from both ‘Germany’ and ‘Geneva’ – perhaps implies that we should not try too hard! English ballads about ‘monstrous births’ were often very specific in identifying time, place and parents but this one is perhaps strategically vague. The reference to Geneva, for example, may have served to trigger the city’s associations with zealous religion and the English Protestant exiles of the 1550s. The references to the unfortunate mother’s Bible, neglected in favour of her looking-glass, perhaps added to the effect. The city-setting thus set a mood that was conducive to the contemplation of divine intervention and the urgency of repentance.
Many types of so-called monstrosity, including conjoined twins, were fascinating to early-modern people all over Europe (Walsham, Burnett, Guerrini, Kitch). Unusually-formed babies, dead or alive, were stared at by visitors and exhibited on a commercial basis at fairs and other sites. In England, numerous books, ballads and broadsides of the period spread news of such births and guided consumers as they sought to understand them (see Related texts). Scholars have detected a shift in the seventeenth century from interpretations that focused on divine judgement and the need for repentance towards an understanding of ‘monstrous’ births as medical curiosities that still revealed God’s wondrous power but did not necessarily express his condemnation of sin in the same way (Guerrini).
Prides fall is interesting because, as a regularly reprinted song, it carried the Elizabethan/Jacobean message about divine judgement into the era in which somewhat more scientific interests are said to have prevailed. Presumably, this shift must have conditioned consumption of the ballad, perhaps generating a feeling that this was a piece of history, rather than live news. When the eighteenth-century publishers, William and Cluer Dicey, catalogued their wares in 1754, they included it among their ’Old ballads’. Having said this, it can also be suggested that, where ballads are concerned, the notion that divine punishment for sin had faded from ‘monstrous birth’ ballads by the later seventeenth century has been somewhat exaggerated (see Related texts).
This ballad was clearly a classic of its kind, and we should note that it was the only song about a ‘monstrous birth’ that appears in our list. It displays many of the features and perspectives that have been identified as characteristic of Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes to such births.
In particular, the manner in which the child’s abnormalities reflect specific human vanities – the painted heads, ruff, looking-glass and ‘pinked shooes’, for example – is a commonplace of the genre. As Alexandra Walsham has put it with characteristic elegance, God was said to deploy ‘monstrous’ babies by ‘projecting onto their diminutive bodies a silhouette of the sins which had infested the body politic’. The ballad’s call to universal repentance was another standard feature, though the manner in which this call is delivered in the voice of the freakishly articulate talking baby seems to distinguish this ballad from other comparable songs.
Walsham distinguishes two strains in contemporary attitudes to ‘monstrous births’. On the one hand, they screamed the need for national repentance but, on the other, they were punishments for the specific sins of individual parents. Interestingly, Prides fall combines the two strains, developing a universal message (‘Mankind repent with speed,/ before the Lord do smite’) from the numerous vanities of a single woman (‘Every vain foolish toy,/ changeth my wanton mind’). Arguably, the ballad-makers’ all-encompassing approach combined with the graphic woodcut, the talking ‘monster’ and the surprisingly buoyant tune to establish the song’s long-lasting popularity (see also Featured tune history and Featured woodcut history).
Christopher Marsh
References
Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘monsters’ in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture (Basingstoke, 2002).
William and Cluer Dicey, A catalogue (1754), p. 52.
John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (1628), no. 25.
English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/
English Short Title Catalogue.
Anita Guerrini, ‘Advertising monstrosity: broadsides and human exhibition in early eighteenth-century London’ in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (eds.), Ballads and broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Farnham, 2010), pp. 109-27.
Aaron W. Kitch, ‘Printing bastards: monstrous birth broadsides in early modern England’ in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and parenting in early modern England (Abingdon, 2005), pp. 221-36.
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), nos. 2194 and 2195.
The Shirburn ballads, 1585-1616, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1907), pp. 134-39.
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 194-203.
To the tune of ‘All you that love good fellows’ (standard name)
The purpose of this section is to provide brief notes on the melody followed by detailed evidence relating to its career, paying particular attention to the ‘echoes’ (inter-song associations and connections) that may have been set up if it was nominated for the singing of more than one ballad. In the list presented in the ‘Songs and Summaries’ section below, we have endeavoured to include as many of the black-letter ballads that used the tune as possible, under any of its variant names. Titles from our chart of best-sellers are presented in bold type (these are also in colour when there is a link to the relevant ballad page on the website). It should be noted that it is extremely difficult to date many ballads precisely and the chronological order in which the songs are listed is therefore very approximate (we have drawn on previous attempts to date the ballads, making adjustments when additional evidence can be brought into play). In most cases, we list the earliest surviving edition of a ballad, though in many instances there may have been earlier versions, now lost.
Versions and variations
Notation for this distinctive, march-like tune can be found in a number of sources, printed and manuscript: the Shirburn ballads (1585-1616); the Fitzwilliam virginal book (late sixteenth and early seventeenth century); the Welde lute book (c. 1598-1603); Wit and mirth (edition of 1714); and Charles Coffey’s ballad-opera, The Devil to Pay (1731). There are minor variations between these versions but they are all unmistakably the same tune. Indeed, the stability of the melody across a period of well over one hundred years is notable. Our recording uses the notation in Wit and mirth, where the tune provides the setting for ‘The LONDON PRENTICE’ (a reprint of our hit song, The Honour of a London Prentice). The melody also occurs in several Dutch songbooks of the seventeenth century, a list of which is provided by Claude Simpson (see below).
Within English balladry, the tune was known variously as ‘All you that are/love/be good fellows’, ‘[The worthy] London prentice’ and ‘England’s fair dainty dames’ (from the first line of the song under discussion here). In instrumental manuscripts, it is also found under the titles ‘Nancie’ and ‘Nowells delight’.
Echoes (an overview)
The Honour of a London Prentice was one of the first ballads to use this melody, though the tune-title, ‘All you that are Good Fellows’, probably indicates the existence of an earlier song, now lost, that opened with this line. The earliest associations of the melody therefore appear to have been with manly sociability and heroism. These associations were carried into the third ballad on the list below, A true discourse of the winning of the towne of Berke by Grave Maurice, which celebrates the military prowess of a great Dutch leader (see also Good Newes from Virginia).
During the early seventeenth century, however, the melody took a somewhat surprising turn, and the remaining ballads on the list below are all cautionary tales, most of them telling stories about sinful women who repent or receive punishment (sometimes both). The first of these was our current focus, Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women. This was a highly successful song in its own right, and it was clearly significant in shifting, or augmenting, the tune’s existing associations. All the subsequent ballads on the list below reveal its influence (see, for example, Natures Wonder, which follows Prides fall in describing a ‘monstrous’ birth).
The continuing success of The Honour of a London Prentice suggests, however, that the tune’s manly and heroic resonances remained potent, and it is interesting to speculate on the interplay between songs – two of them certainly hits – that deployed the melody for such different subject matter.
Perhaps it brought to the ballads about sinful women - Prides fall, for example - an upbeat hint of heroism that was not explicit in the text. In A true Relation of one Susan Higges, the tune helps to fashion a female criminal as an anti-hero, subverting all that is praiseworthy in The Honour of a London Prentice (including his masculinity, his honour and his dedication to duty). In A true Relation, Susan Higges is purposefully provocative, boasting, ‘We women still for gallant minds/ may well compare with men’. In the long term, the march-like manliness of the melody may have proved its strongest asset; it seems likely that a a still-famous tune, ‘The British Grenadiers’, began life as a variant of ‘All you that are Good-Fellows’.
The melody provides the strongest connection between the songs but there are also a number of textual cross-references or affinities. Compare, for example, three pairs of half-verses:
Pair 1: ‘One hand held right the shape/ of a fair looking-glasse,/ In which I took delight/ how my vain beauty was’ [Prides fall]; ‘My Glass it was my Book,/ wherein I took delight;/ In it I usd to look,/ from morning until night’ [The Court-Miss Converted].
Pair 2: ‘For being faint for food,/ they scarcely could withstand/ The noble force, and fortitude,/ and courage of his hand’ [The Honour of a London Prentice]; ‘With Judgments for to humble them,/ and make them feel his hand:/ O turn unto the Lord in time,/ for none can him withstand’ [Natures Wonder].
Pair 3: ‘Where to the Magistrates/ in a most fearful sort,/ Began aloud to speak,/ and these words did report [Prides fall]; ‘Where thus, for twenty yeeres at least,/ I livd in gallant sort:/ Which made the Countrey marvell much,/ to heare of my report’ [A true Relation of one Susan Higges].
Although groups of songs to other tunes are sometimes more intricately interwoven in textual terms, it is nevertheless clear that the ballads set to this tune deserve to be considered in relation to one another.
[See 'Postscript', below, for additional notes on this melody].
Songs and Summaries
The Honour of a London Prentice./ Wherein is declared his matchless Manhood, and brave Adventures... To Tune is , All you that are Good-Fellows (originally Elizabethan; W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1687-88). Pepys 3.252; EBBA 21266. Gender – masculinity; Employment – apprenticeship/service, professions; Places – English, extra-European, travel/transport; Politics – Royalist; foreign affairs; Royalty – praise; Violence – animals, interpersonal, punitive; Emotions – excitement, patriotism, pride; Bodies – clothing; Death – duelling/jousting, execution; Recreation – games/sports; Religion – Christ/God, Bible. This tells the story of a valiant young man from London, sent to Turkey as a merchant’s factor, who battles all-comers at the Sultan’s court and then defies death by pulling out the hearts of the lions appointed to eat him.
Good Newes from Virginia... To the tune of All those that be good fellowes (John Trundle, 1597-1626). National Archives, London, reprinted in E. D. Neill, Virginia Vetusta, 1885, pp. 147-53. Death – warfare; Emotions – pride, hope; Employment – sailors/soldiers, crafts/trades; Gender – marriage; Places – extra-European, travel/transport; Politics – foreign affiars, war; Violence – between states. This trumpets the bravery of those who are defending England’s colonies in Virginia against attacks from the native Americans.
A true discourse of the winning of the towne of Berke by Grave Maurice... To the Tune of All those that are good fellowes (copied out by hand, 1600-03). Shirburn ballads, LXVII. Places – European; Politics – foreign affairs, war; Bodies – injury; Death – warfare; Employment – sailors/soldiers; Gender – masculinity; News – political, international; Violence – between states; Royalty – praise. This describes how Maurice of Nassau besieged the town of Rheinberg, hereby wresting it back from Spanish control.
Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women... The Tune is, All you that love good fellows (composed c. 1609 but perhaps to a different tune; registered 1656; F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright, 1665-74). Euing 269; EBBA 31879. Family – pregnancy/childbirth, children/parents; Gender – femininity; Morality – general; Religion – Divine intervention, sin/repentance, Christ/God, Bible, Bodies – looks/physique, clothing, adornment; Emotions – pride, fear, shame, horror, wonder; Places – European, travel/transport; Recreation – fashions, food; Death – illness; Employment – professions; News – international, sensational. A vain and wealthy continental woman who craves a baby is punished by God with a monstrous birth, intended as a warning to her and all others of her sex.
A true Relation of one Susan Higges... To the tune of, The worthy London Prentice (F. C., 1624-80). Roxburghe 1.424-25; EBBA 30289. Crime – robbery/theft, murder, punishment; Death – execution, unlawful killing; Violence – interpersonal; Economy – livings; Places – English; Emotions – sorrow; Employment – female; Gender – femininity, cross-dressing, sex; Morality – general; Religion – sin/repentance; Bodies – physique/looks; Environment – roads. A woman describes her life of crime, brought finally to an end when she is convicted of murder.
Natures Wonder... The Tune is, London Prentice: Or, Jovial Batchelor (E. Andrews, 1664). Euing 237; EBBA 31785. Family – pregnancy/childbirth, siblings; Disability – physical; Bodies – looks/physique; Death – providential; Religion – sin/repentances, Christ/God, divine intervention; Morality – general; News – domestic, sensational; Emotions – wonder, fear; Places – English. This describes a deformed baby born in Salisbury, interpreting the new arrival as a warning from God to all parents about the urgent need to repent their sins.
The Court-Miss Converted: OR, A Looking Glass for Ladies... Tune of, Englands fair dainty Dames (F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke, 1675-804-79?). Crawford 1317/1; EBBA 33986. Religion – sin/repentance, prayer; Gender – femininity, courtship; Bodies – looks/physique, clothing, adornment; Emotions – shame; Morality – general. A woman charts her journey from a life of pride and vanity to one of repentance and godliness, thus setting an example for ‘Ladies of each degree’.
Postscript
The tune was also nominated for a festive song in the collection, Good and True, Fresh and New Christmas Carols (1642). The first line is ‘All you that are good fellowes’ and it therefore seems possible that an earlier version of this song, now lost, may have been the source of one of the main tune titles, though we cannot be sure.
Christopher Marsh
References
Andrew Clark (ed.), The Shirburn ballads, 1585-1616 (Oxford, 1907), pp. 272-73.
Charles Coffey, The Devil to Pay (1731), p. 2.
The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, ed. J. A. Fuller Maitland and W. Barclay Squire, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1894-99), vol. 1, p. 57.
Good and True, Fresh and New Christmas Carols (1642), A3v-4r.
Claude Simpson, The British broadside ballad and its music (New Brunswick, 1966), pp. 13-16.
Welde lute book (c. 1598-1603), private collection of Lord Forester, fo. 7.
Wit and mirth (1714), vol. 5, p. 259.
Back to contentsStandard woodcut name: Monster baby
The purpose of this section is to provide evidence relating to the career of the image under discussion, paying particular attention to the ‘reflections’ (inter-song associations and connections) that may have been set up if it was chosen to illustrate more than one ballad. The list given below includes all ballads from the Pepys and Roxburghe collections that feature this woodcut or a close variant (these are the two largest collections, including approximately 3300 sheets, in total). References to ballads from other collections occur only when the featured edition of the song under consideration here (or the featured edition of another song from our list) comes from such a source. Ballads from our chart of best-sellers are presented in bold type, and they also appear in colour where there is a link to another song in the database. Please note, however, that the editions of hit songs listed below are not necessarily those for which digital images are presented on this website. Cross-references to other examples of our featured woodcuts are also presented in bold. It is extremely difficult to date many ballads precisely and the chronological order in which the songs are listed is therefore very approximate (we have drawn on previous attempts to date the ballads, making adjustments when additional evidence can be brought into play).
Reflections (an overview)
This image, clearly designed specifically for Prides fall, has not been found on any other ballad in the two largest collections. Even by the flexible and creative standards of the time, it is difficult to imagine another scenario that could accommodate it. The only title listed below is therefore our featured edition, taken from the Euing collection.
The woodcut was used so frequently on editions of Prides fall that it must have been a vital component in the song’s long-lived success. Two distinct woodblocks seem to have existed, one boxed and slightly more compact than the other. The artist, not surprisingly, focuses on the physical abnormalities of the ballad’s moralising baby, and it is easy to imagine listeners and readers picking out the details as they assimilated text and image. Clearly, this woodcut was a winner, and it was still being used to illustrate the ballad during the eighteenth century.
Songs and summaries
Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women (F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright, 1665-74). Euing 269; EBBA 31879. Family – pregnancy/childbirth, children/parents; Gender – femininity; Morality – general; Religion – Divine intervention, sin/repentance, Christ/God, Bible, Bodies – looks/physique, clothing, adornment; Emotions – pride, fear, shame, horror, wonder; Places – European, travel/transport; Recreation – fashions, food; Death – illness; Employment – professions; News – international, sensational. A vain and wealthy continental woman who craves a baby is punished by God with a monstrous birth, intended as a warning to her and all others of her sex (picture placement: the figure appears beneath the title and there is no other image).
Christopher Marsh
Back to contentsNumerous publications of the period 1550-1700 described and interpreted ‘monstrous births’ but very few of them were closely and directly related to Prides fall at the level of precise verbal content.
Examples of texts about unusually-formed babies that were published in the cheaper forms of print include the following (anonymous in all cases):
The true description of two monstrous children, laufully begotten betwene George Stevens and Margerie his wyfe, and borne in the parish of Swanburne in Buckyngham shyre (mid-sixteenth century).
The true description of a monsterous Chylde Born in the Ile of Wight (1552-71).
The true description of two monsterous Chyldren, Borne at Herne in Kent (1565).
The true fourme and shape of a monsterous Chyld Which was borne in stony Stratford in North Hampton shire (1565).
A most certaine report of a monster borne at Oteringham in Holdernesse (1595).
A true relation of the birth of three monsters in the city of Namen in Flanders (1608).
Strange newes of a prodigious monster borne in the towneship of Allington in the parish of Standish in the countie of Lancaster (1613).
Gods handy-worke in wonders miraculously shewen upon two women, lately delivered of two monsters (1615).
Signes and wonders from heaven. With a true relation of a monster borne in Ratcliffe Highway (1645).
A declaration of a strange and wonderfull monster born in Kirkham parish in Lancashire (1646).
The strange monster or, true news from Nottingham-shire of a strange monster born at Grasly (1668).
This repetitive list of titles demonstrates the early-modern fascination with abnormal births, and a particular emphasis is placed on the physical descriptions of all these unfortunate infants as evidence of (a) authenticity, (b) monstrosity and (c) God’s work in the world. The consistent attention that is paid to precise details of time and place is equally apparent. It is also worth noting that, as all these publications came and went, Prides fall remained in print, a constant point of reference during the seventeenth century. It may well have been the most widely known work on ‘monstrous’ births in the entire early-modern period.
It has been argued that ‘monstrous births’ were losing their association with divine judgement and the need for repentance during the seventeenth century (Guerrini). Several ballads of the period 1660-1700 suggest, however, that this idea remained powerful, at least within this particular genre. These included not only the regular editions of Prides fall but also songs such as Natures wonder (1664) and The wonder of this present age (1685-88).
Admittedly, judgement and repentance were sometimes a little less central than they had previously been but these concepts were clearly holding their own: ‘Let us from Sin our Lives reclaim,/ that we Gods anger may escape’ (The wonder of this present age). Natures wonder also shared its tune with Prides fall (see Featured tune history).
Christopher Marsh
References
Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘monsters’ in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture (Basingstoke, 2002).
Anita Guerrini, ‘Advertising monstrosity: broadsides and human exhibition in early eighteenth-century London’ in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (eds.), Ballads and broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Farnham, 2010), pp. 109-27.
Aaron W. Kitch, ‘Printing bastards: monstrous birth broadsides in early modern England’ in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and parenting in early modern England (Abingdon, 2005), pp. 221-36.
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 194-203.
Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women./ By the Example of a strange Monster born of late in Germany, by a Merchants proud Wife in Geneva.
The Tune is, All you that love good Fellows.
[Play each verse by clicking anywhere within its text]
see here the fall of Pride,
Wantonness leave in time,
that God may be your guide;
I was a Dutch-land Vrow,
shining in beauty bright,
And a brave Merchants wife,
in whom he took delight.
my heart could wish or crave
My dyet dainty fair,
my garments rich and brave:
No wife in Germany,
where I in pleasure dwel’d,
For Golden bravery,
my person so excel’d.
and deckt with pearl and gold
Carried me up and down,
whereas my pleasure would:
The earth I deem’d too base,
my feet to tread upon,
My blooming crimson cheeks,
felt neither wind nor sun.
my self an Angel bright,
Framed of a heavenly mold,
and not an earthly Wight:
For my souls happiness,
Gods Holy Bible Book,
I had my Looking=glasse,
where I most pleasure took.
that might advance my pride,
But in my Looking-glass
my fancy soon espy’d:
Every vain foolish toy,
changeth my wanton mind,
And they best pleased me,
that could new fashions find.
yeilded me small content,
In that Dame nature had
ne’r a Child to me sent:
That makes my heart so bleed,
for which offence to God,
He therefore grievously
scourged me with his Rod.
of so pure flesh and blood,
Created he, strange to see,
a most deformed brood:
That women of wanton pride,
may take example by,
How they in fashion fond,
offend the Lord on high.
and I brought to my bed,
No cost was spar’d that night,
to stand me in my steed:
Ny Nurses young and fair,
fit for a Royal Queen,
Gave all attendance there,
as it was daily seen.
of Ladies such a train,
That came in gentle sort,
at the hour of my pain:
But when my swelling womb,
yielded up natures due,
Such a strange monster then
never man hardly knew.
The second Part, To the same Tune.
all the whole company,
That e’re one said in heart,
vengeance now draweth nigh
It had two faces strang,
and two heads painted fair,
On the brows curled locks,
such as our wantons ware.
of a fair looking=glass,
In which I took delight
how my vain beauty was;
Right the shape of a Rod,
scourging me for my Sin,
The other seem’d to have,
perfectly seen therein.
and their vain foolish minds,
Never contentented are
with that thing God assigns;
Look to it London Dames,
God keepeth Plagues in store,
And now the second part
of this song sheweth more.
where God offended is,
As the poor Merchants wife,
did worldly comfort miss:
Strange were the miseries,
that she so long endur’d,
No ease by womens help,
could be as then procur’d.
with a voice fearfully,
Mother, your wanton pride,
brings this your misery:
Let your life soon amend,
or else the mighty God,
Will scourge your wantonness
with a more sharper Rod.
it had now gallantly,
Starched with white and blew,
seemly unto the eye.
With laces long and broad,
as now are womens bands,
Thus heavy wanton Pride,
first in Gods anger stands.
as still the Merchants be,
Now as lew’d women wear,
To hide Adultery:
Every part, every limb,
had not true natures frame,
But to shew to the world,
this my great sin and shame.
monster=like was it born,
Every part had the shape
of fashions daily worn:
On the feet pinked shooes,
insteps had Roses red,
Which in silk now is us’d,
so vainly are we fed.
nourisht now near my heart,
Puts me now in mind of Sin,
and bids me now convert;
O let all women then
take heed of wanton pride,
Angels have fallen from Heaven
and for that sin have dy’d.
was this fruit of my youth,
But to the Councel=house
it was brought for a truth;
Where to the Magistrates
in a most fearful sort,
Began a loud to speak,
and these words did report.
now sent from God on high,
To bid you all repent,
Christ comming draweth nigh.
Repent you all with speed,
this is a message sure,
The world seems at an end,
and cannot long endure.
which is our chief delight,
Mankind repent with speed,
before the Lord do smite,
This is my last adieu,
repentance soon provide,
These were his latest words,
and so the monster dy’d.
that these same speeches heard
God grant all Christians may
have their minds well prepar’d
With true repentance,
Gods mercy to implore,
That never woman=kind
may bring such fruit forth more
that in pride do excell,
This woful misery,
in your hearts print full well:
Let not Pride be your guide,
for Pride will have a fall,
Maid and Wife, let my life,
be warning to you all.
Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright.
This ballad is included according to the criteria for List A (see Methodology). The evidence presented here is accurate, to the best of our knowledge, as of 1st January 2024.
Shirburn ballads: no. XXXIII.
Appearances on Ballad Partners' lists: Coles, Wright, Vere and Gilberston, 1656; Coles, Vere, Wright and Clarke, 1675; and Thackeray, 1689 (as 'Englands fair dainty Dames' from first line).
Other registrations with Stationers' Company: none.
No. of known editions c.1560-1711: 9
No. of extant copies: 8
New tune-titles generated: 'Englands fair dainty dames' (1 ballad).
Specially-commissioned woodcuts: Monster baby on featured edition (and other editions).
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases: 5 references, with no evidence of later collection as a folk-song (Roud no. V9422).
POINTS: 2 + 20 + 0 + 18 + 8 + 2 + 5 + 0 = 55
This box will be used to highlight any new information on this song that might come to light after the launch of the website.
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