The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad

Abstract

In actual practice the English broadside ballad did not exist before the introduction of printing; but it is not accurate to assert that “street ballads begin about 1540,” or even to call Skelton's ballad on Flodden Field (1513)—said to be the earliest printed street ballad extant—the beginning of the genre. Undoubtedly the ballad had begun to play an important rôle before 1500, and in its origin runs much farther back, far antedating the art of printing. To all intents the street ballad was matured as early as 1500; while satirical poems, invectives, lamentations, and short jocular and religious stanzas of a still earlier period have many of the features that characterize printed broadside ballads and unquestionably prepared the way for them. Early in the fifteenth century, writers of such ballad-poems tried to circulate them on manuscript broadsheets. Naturally, therefore, the advent of printing merely facilitated and increased the production of rimed broadsides, until, in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, they came to be the chief publications of the London press and the works most dear to the common people.