Anonymous (English broadside ballads)

The broadside ballad was the cheap newspaper, song sheet and picture of early modern England: a single sheet printed on one side with a woodcut, a long title, the name of a tune to sing it to, and verses on love, marriage, murder, wonders, war, trade and politics. London printers issued them by the thousand from the reign of Elizabeth to the end of the seventeenth century, usually without the author's name, and they were pasted on walls and sold in the streets by pedlars.

The texts come from the Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), whose volunteers hand-keyed early English printed books from the Early English Books Online page images and released them free of restriction. Each ballad is printed here from its TCP transcription with long s normalised and the printers' VV set as W; the original spelling is otherwise kept, and only verse is taken, without imprints, woodcut descriptions or prose paragraphs. A ballad that survives in several printings appears once, from the earliest clean one, and the note lists the other printings. The refrain cues printed as "&c." are kept as printed. A text with any illegible letter in the transcription was left out.