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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2018
This paper investigates the representation of marital relations in some of the most successful broadside ballads published in seventeenth-century England. It explains the manner in which these have been selected as part of a funded research project, and it proceeds to question an existing historiographical emphasis on ballads in which marriages were portrayed as under threat due to a combination of wifely failings (scolding, adultery, violence) and husbandly shortcomings (sexual inadequacy, jealousy, weakness). Best-selling ballads were much more sympathetic to married women in particular than we might have expected, and the implications of this for our understanding of the ballad market and early modern culture more generally may be significant. These ballads, it is argued, were often aimed particularly at women, and they grew out of an interesting negotiation between male didacticism and female taste. Throughout the paper, an attempt is made to understand ballads as songs and visual artefacts, rather than merely as texts.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy for generously funding the research upon which this paper is based.
1 A Ditty delightfull of mother watkins ale (?Abel Jeffs, c. 1592). All the ballads discussed in this paper were printed in London. The tune can be found in Simpson, Claude M., The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, 1966), 745Google Scholar. All ballad citations in this paper will retain the original capitalisation because it seems possible that the precise layout of the words was an important aspect of the publishers’ strategy.
2 Henry Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame (1593), C2r; Estienne de Maisonneufve, Gerileon of England. The second part (1592), A4r; Rollins, Hyder E., An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Chapel Hill, 1924)Google Scholar, no. 3058; Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), 67Google Scholar.
3 On Deloney's songs, see Christopher Marsh, ‘Best-Selling Ballads and the Female Voices of Thomas Deloney’, forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly.
4 On balladry in general, see Würzbach, Natascha, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Watt, Cheap Print; Marsh, Christopher, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar, chs. 5 and 6; Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Farnham, 2010); McShane, Angela, ‘Ballads and Broadsides’, in Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Raymond, Joad (Oxford, 2011), 339–62Google Scholar; Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection, ed. Patricia Fumerton (Tempe, Arizona, 2012).
5 See, in particular, http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ and http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. In this paper, I will refer to the EBBA website regularly so that readers can view the ballads that cannot be displayed here. The quickest way to find a song is to type the EBBA number into the search box.
6 See, for example, Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 186–7Google Scholar, 207–8, 223; Kane, Stuart A., ‘Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Community’, Criticism, 38 (1996), 219–37Google Scholar; Stavreva, Kirilka, ‘Scaffolds into Prints: Executing the Insubordinate Wife in the Ballad Trade of Early Modern England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997), 177–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England (Lincoln, NB, 2015), 46–8; Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England 1500–1700 (1998), 31–2, 98; Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (1998), 24; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999), 104, 111, 193–4; Capp, Bernard, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 12–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Women and Murder in Early Modern News Pamphlets and Broadside Ballads, 1573–1697, ed. Martin Randall (Aldershot, 2005); Simone Chess, ‘“And I my vowe did keepe”: Oath Making, Subjectivity and Husband Murder in “Murderous Wife” Ballads’, in Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini, 131–48; Frances E. Dolan, ‘Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres’, in Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini, 149–72; Williams, Sarah F., Damnable Practices: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Farnham, 2015)Google Scholar.
7 Cuckolds Haven (Francis Grove, 1638), EBBA 30036; Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), 117Google Scholar.
8 Wiltenburg, Joy, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, 1992)Google Scholar; Clark, Sandra, ‘The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice’, in Debating Gender in Early Modern England 1500–1700, ed. Malcolmson, Christina and Suzuki, Mihoko (Basingstoke, 2002), 103–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hubbard, Eleanor, City Women. Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), 14–15Google Scholar, 112, 126–31.
9 Arguably, we are still bedevilled by a wish to use ballads as representational ‘mirrors’ of social life. It surely makes more sense to regard them as an integral and influential feature of quotidian existence. Ballads were embedded and involved in early modern lives, rather than being a set of black-and-white snapshots captured from above.
10 The ‘lyrics only’ approach informs many works, including Würzbach, Rise of the English Street Ballad; and Ganev, Robin, Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar. For more multi-media perspectives, see Marsh, Christopher, ‘The Sound of Print in Early Modern England: The Broadside Ballad as Song’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Crick, Julia C. and Walsham, Alexandra (Cambridge, 2004), 171–90Google Scholar, and ‘Best-Selling Ballads and their Pictures in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 233 (2016), 53–99; Barrow, Theodore, ‘From “Easter Wedding” to “The Frantick Lover”: The Repeated Woodcut and its Shifting Roles’, in Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print, ed. Murphy, Kevin D. and O'Driscoll, Sally (Lewisburg, 2013), 219–39Google Scholar; Alexandra Franklin, ‘Making Sense of Broadside Ballad Illustrations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Studies in Ephemera, ed. Murphy and O'Driscoll, 169–93; McIlvenna, Una, ‘The Power of Music: The Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads’, Past and Present, 229 (2015), 47–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Damnable Practices; Palmer, Megan E., ‘Picturing Song across Species: Broadside Ballads in Image and Word’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 79 (2016), 221–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 In the influential books by Anthony Fletcher, Elizabeth Foyster, Bernard Capp and Laura Gowing – all cited above – there are roughly 132 references to named ballads, only three of which appear on our full list of 120 hit songs (and all three are mentioned very briefly). Once again, an exception is Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women. This discusses several of our hit ballads, though they are not generally distinguished from other titles in terms of their immense popularity.
12 The lamentable fall of Queen Elenor (1586–1625; F. Coles, T. Vere and W. Gilbertson, 1658–64), EBBA 31939. The tune has not been found. Similarly troublesome women can be found in the hit songs A Godly Warning for all Maidens (c. 1603; W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1686–8), EBBA 20238, and A good Wife, or none (c. 1624; Francis Coules, 1624–80), EBBA 30086.
13 Women and Murder, ed. Randall, xi–xii; Kane, ‘Wives with Knives’, 219; Stavreva, ‘Scaffolds into Prints’; Foyster, Manhood, 105–6.
14 The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth (c. 1590; H. Gosson, c. 1609), EBBA 20054. For the tune, see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 227. Excerpts from most of the ballads discussed in this paper were played in the lecture, some from our new recordings and some in live performance. A film of the lecture can be accessed at https://royalhistsoc.org/category/rhs-video-archive/.
15 For general comments on the representation of female murderers, see Dolan, Frances E., Dangerous Familiars. Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, 1994), 49–50Google Scholar; Women and Murder, ed. Randall, xiii; and Kane, ‘Wives with Knives’, 226–7. The contemporary pamphlet account of the case is in Sundrye strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed (1591), B2r–B4v. In this version, Mistress Page is much more wicked, deceitful and culpable than she is in the ballad.
16 Joy Wiltenburg has noted that successful murder ballads tended to ‘invite intensive imaginative participation’ by presenting vividly the ‘inner turmoil’ of the repentant criminal. See Joy Wiltenburg, ‘Ballads and the Emotional Life of Crime’, in Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini, 173–88.
17 Prides fall: Or, A warning for all English Women (1585–1616; F. Coles, T. Vere and J. Wright, 1663–74), EBBA 31879; The Honour of a London Prentice (c. 1580–1600; W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1686–8), EBBA 21266. The latter ballad was probably an Elizabethan composition. The melody can be found in various early modern sources, ranging from sixteenth-century instrumental collections to eighteenth-century song books (see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 14).
18 The lamentable Ditty of Little Mousgrove (H. Gosson, c. 1630), EBBA 20172. Folksong versions of this narrative were regularly collected in twentieth-century America where it was known under various names, including ‘Little Matty Grove’. The original tune is lost.
19 A new Ballad of the Souldier and Peggy (F. Coules, c. 1640), EBBA 30250. For the tune, see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 572.
20 The valorous Acts performed at Gaunt, By the brave bonny Lasse Mary Ambre (William Gilbertson, 1647–65?), EBBA 36066. Successful woodblocks were often altered and copied; the difference between the two pictures is not, therefore, unusual.
21 Capp, When Gossips Meet, 12. The other ballads in this sub-group of eight are: The Woful Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore (c. 1624; F. Coles, T. Vere and J. Wright, 1663–74), EBBA 32019; A Lamentable Ballad of Fair Rosamond (c. 1593; W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1686–8), EBBA 20235; A New little Northren Song (H. G., c. 1631), EBBA 20122; An excellent Ballad of the Mercer's Son of Midhurst (c. 1624; J. Clarke, W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1684–6), EBBA 20258.
22 The Happy Husbandman (P. Brooksby, 1685–8), EBBA 21041. The tune was composed for the ballad and can be found in Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 502. For other generally positive representations of marital relationships in our group of hit ballads, see A pleasant Song of the Valiant Deeds of Chivalry (c. 1592; F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright and J. Clarke, 1674–9), EBBA 30400; A pleasant new Ballad of the Miller of Mansfield (c. 1588; E. Wright, 1611–56), EBBA 30162; The Shepherd and the King (c. 1578; A. M., 1686–93), EBBA 32009.
23 A constant Wife, a kinde Wife (F. C., c. 1631), EBBA 20181. For the tune, see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 445. See also An excellent Ballad of a Prince of Englands Courtship to the King of France's Daughter (1585–1616; Alex. Milbourn, 1686–93), EBBA 30068.
24 A worthy example of a vertuous wife, who fed her father with her own milk (c. 1596; E. W., c. 1635), EBBA 30398.
25 See Maximus, Valerius, Memorable Doings and Sayings, trans. and ed. Bailey, D. R. Shackleton (2 vols., Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar, i, 501; Pliny. Natural History, trans. and ed. H. Rackham (10 vols., London and Cambridge, MA, 1938–62), ii (1942), 587. The pivotal scene in this tale was painted during the early modern period by Rubens, Caravaggio and many others.
26 A memorable Song on the unhappy hunting in Chevy-Chase (c. 1624; F. Coles, T. Vere and J. Wright, 1663–74), EBBA 30408. The tune was one of the most popular of the period (see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 97).
27 An Excellent Ballad of Patient Grissel (c. 1624; F. Coles, T. Vere and W. Gilbertson, 1658–64), EBBA 31768. The tune is lost. On this and other representations of Grissel in the period, see Bronfman, Judith, ‘Griselda, Renaissance Woman’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print. Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Haselkorn, Anne M. and Travitsky, Betty S. (Amherst, 1990), 211–23Google Scholar.
28 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (2005), 336; The ANCIENT, True, and Admirable History of Patient Grisel (1619), C4v.
29 So said Sir Robert Cotton, quoted in Rollins, Hyder, ‘The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 34 (1919), 336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 The most Rare and Excellent History, Of the Dutchess of Suffolks Callamity (c. 1592; F. Coles, T. Vere and J. Wright, 1663–74), EBBA 31743; The Brides Buriall (c. 1603; H. G., c. 1635), EBBA 30586. The tunes can be found in Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, on 588 and 368 respectively. See also A Lamentable ballad of the tragical end of a Gallant Lord (c. 1570; F. Coles, T. Vere and W. Gilbertson, 1658–64?), EBBA 31955, and A most excellent Ballad, of an old man and his wife (E. [A.], 1620), EBBA 20028.
31 The Constancy of SUSANNA (c. 1562; W. Thackeray, J. Millet and A. Milbourn, 1689–92?), EBBA 33840. Constancy was a key virtue for ballad-women and, intriguingly, our 120 hit songs were much more likely to include the word ‘constant’ and/or related terms than were ballads in general. ‘Constance’ was also a fashionable girl's name in England during the seventeenth century, fading away in the decades after 1700 (www.ancestry.co.uk/).
32 A Fiddler's Tune Book from Eighteenth-Century Wales, ed. Cass Meurig (Aberystwyth, 2004), 127. I am grateful to Judith Marsh for bringing this source to my attention. For another version of the melody, see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 412. This interesting tune was Elizabethan and originally had romantic associations as a result of its connection with Elderton's song, The panges of love. Arguably, the ballad about Susanna was an unusually successful attempt to redirect these associations towards something more godly.
33 This refrain also appears in the earlier ballad by Elderton (it was clearly the ‘hook’ in both songs, and playwrights regularly made reference to it).
34 Compare the various editions that are included at http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. Artists who depicted Susanna and the elders included Ruben, Van Dyck and Rembrandt. The scene was also used regularly in domestic wall-paintings, and many representations are listed in auction catalogues of the period.
35 The Woman to the PLOW (F. Grove, c. 1629), EBBA 32024. Several versions of the tale, under names such as ‘Father Grumble’ and ‘Old Dorrington’, can be found by searching the various databases available at www.vwml.org/vwml-home. I am grateful to Tim Somers for bringing the medley to my attention: Samuel Moore, Medley (c. 1700), Victoria and Albert Museum, E.128–1944.
36 See, for example, THE Hen-peckt CUCKOLD: OR, The Cross-grain'd Wife (J. Millet, 1685?), EBBA 21793.
37 Anthony Fletcher detects ‘a misogynist streak’ in ballads on male and female work but does not mention this extremely popular song (Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, 230).
38 See, for example, Flather, Amanda, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), 43–50Google Scholar, and ‘Space, Place and Gender: the Sexual and Spatial Division of Labour in the Early-Modern Household’, History and Theory, 52 (2013), 344–60; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 5–6, 26, and ‘“The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social Space, 1560–1640’, in Londinopolis. Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early-Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester, 2000), 134–5, 137–8.
39 Clement Robinson, A Handfull of pleasant delites (1584), A1r; John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (1628), B61. Several suggestive sources are gathered together in Würzbach, Rise of the English Street Ballad, 263–4, 266, 275, 278, 279, 280–2. On female consumers of balladry, see also Williams, Sarah F., ‘Witches, Lamenting Women, and Cautionary Tales: Tracing “The Ladies Fall” in Early Modern English Broadside Balladry and Song’, in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. Dunn, Leslie C. and Larson, Katherine R. (Farnham, 2014), 31–46Google Scholar; Clark, ‘The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice’; Brown, Pamela, Better a Shrew than a Sheep. Women, Drama and the Culture of Jest in Early-Modern England (Ithaca, 2003), 90Google Scholar.
40 Margaret Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), 429. See also Clark, ‘The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice’, 103. The female ballad-singers who feature regularly in the artistic output of William Hogarth are discussed in Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, ‘William Hogarth's Pregnant Ballad Sellers and the Engraver's Matrix’, in Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini, 229–50.
41 The Woful Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore.
42 Pearson, Jacqueline, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (New York, 1988), 33–41Google Scholar.
43 Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices. Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (1992), 1, 16.
44 There is a useful overview in Negus, Keith, Popular Music in Theory (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, ch. 1. See also Morley, David, ‘Active Audience Theory. Pendulums and Pitfalls’, Journal of Communication, 43 (1993), 13–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (2003); Huimin, Jim, ‘British Cultural Studies, Active Audiences and the Status of Cultural Theory’, Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (2011), 124–44Google Scholar.
45 Scott Trudell, ‘Performing Women in English Books of Ayres’, in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. Dunn and Larson, 15–29; Musical Voices of Early Modern Women. Many-Headed Melodies, ed. Thomasin LaMay (Farnham, 2005); Austern, Lynda Phyllis, ‘Women's Musical Voices in Sixteenth-Century England’, Early Modern Women, 3 (2008), 127–52Google Scholar.
46 Bennett, Judith M., ‘Ventriloquisms. When Maidens Speak in English Songs, c. 1300–1550’, in Medieval Woman's Song. Cross-Cultural Approaches, ed. Klinck, Anne L. and Rasmussen, Ann Marie (Philadelphia, 2002), 201Google Scholar; Barclay, Katie, ‘“And Four years space, being man and wife, they Loveingly agreed”: Balladry and the Early Modern Understandings of Marriage’, in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. Ewan, Elizabeth and Nugent, Janay (Aldershot, 2008), 30–3Google Scholar.
47 Clark, ‘The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice’, 110.
48 There are no women, for example, in the immensely successful song, Win at First, Lose at Last: Or, A New game at CARDS (1660; F. Cole, T. Vere, J. Wright, J. Clark and T Passinger, c. 1682), EBBA 20818.
