Songs, Ballads, and Broadsides

Ballads were a ubiquitous product of seventeenth-century British popular culture. Cheaply printed in their millions, broadside ballads – so called because they were printed on one side, unlike printing traditions in Europe – were hawked by street singers, who in Britain were associated with criminality, especially pickpocketing. Ballad topics were varied, from natural disasters to politics, and from religious moralising to bawdry, making them an excellent medium by which to understand seventeenth-century British society. English ballads were divided into two categories: white-letter ballads, which were political and usually high-brow, and black-letter ballads, which used gothic font, woodcuts, and simple language, and which could be on any topic. Set to familiar tunes, a technique known as contrafactum, the songs were easy to learn and sing. The melodies were consciously chosen by composers because of their emotional and social connotations which added extra meaning to the new lyrics. The melody also dictated their structure, providing multiple kinds of metre rather than a single ‘ballad metre’ which is anachronistic for the seventeenth century. The simple woodcuts could also carry meaningful associations from their previous appearances. Ballads could use a variety of narrative voices, from the first-person voice of the condemned criminal to dialogue between two singers. They could also use invented regional accents to mock non-English people as ‘the Other’.