The Emergence of the Scottish Broadside Ballad in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

popular songs in the 1960s superseded the work in this context begun by William Chappell in the mid nineteenth century.3 More recently, fine studies by Natascha Würzbach and Tessa Watt have added greatly to our understanding of this form as it blossomed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.4 Meanwhile, building upon the foundations laid by Rollins and Cyprian Blagden, Angela McShane Jones has sought to illuminate the far more voluminous, although far less intensively analysed, material extant after 1640. 5 Such scholarship reveals just how ubiquitous and important the broadside ballad became in English popular culture of the period.The survival rate of this most fragile of media was disastrously low, but this should not disguise the enormous extent of its production.Although only some 250 specimens of single sheet prints containing ballads, 'ABCs' and 'godly tables' survive from England before 1600, Watt has estimated that between three and four million individual copies of them may have been run off the presses in the last four decades of the sixteenth century alone.In subsequent generations the scale of this output was transformed and the nature of its subject matter significantly elaborated, partly as a legacy of the printing explosion of the Civil War era.McShane Jones calculates that around 10,000 individual ballads are extant from the period c.1640-c.1690: applying Watt's multiplier this would imply a total output well in excess of one hundred million single sheets.6 A range of evidence reveals the way in which these broadsides were habitually pasted up in cottages, displayed on alehouse walls, and dispersed around public places.They were performed by professional balladeers as well as sung at work and in leisure by all manner of people.Collected by learned bibliophiles they were no less beloved of children.Employed for religious instruction and political propaganda, they also provided the staples of fiction and fantasy for the widest audience.From the Tudor period, when they first insinuated themselves into the heart of popular culture, until the late nineteenth century when they were eventually overtaken by other media, they remained a powerful and pervasive feature of the English soundscape.7 W. Dauney, Ancient Scottish Melodies, from a Manuscript of the Reign of King James VI (Edinburgh, 1838), pp.30-40; H. Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland Under King James VI (Cambridge, 1969), pp.25-33; E. J. Cowan, 'Calvinism and the Survival of the Folk', in E. J. Cowan (ed.),The People's Past: Scottish Folk, Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1980), pp.36-40.12 On this change of attitude towards the ballad among English Protestants, see P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1988), ch.4; Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, pp.41-50; K. Thomas, 'From Edification to Entertainment', Times Literary Supplement (23 Aug. 1991), pp.5-6.13 A rare survival is The wandering Ievv or, the shoe-maker of Ierusalem (Edinburgh, John Wreirtoun, 1624-40?), copy in the National Records of Scotland, GD 297/123; another early example is, A proper New Ballad, Entitled the Gallant Grahames (Edinburgh?1650?), copy in the National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS], Ry.III.a.10 (5).14 On England see M. Bell and J.

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