Anonymous (Naval Songs and Ballads)

The songs and ballads in this collection are by unknown hands: sailors, ballad-writers and the printers of broadside sheets, who sang of sea-fights, press-gangs, pirates, storms, the pay of seamen and the farewells of lovers. They run from the fourteenth-century ballad on the battle of Sluys to the sea songs of the Crimean War.

They are taken from Naval Songs and Ballads, selected and edited by C. H. Firth (Navy Records Society, vol. 33, 1908), which draws on manuscripts, broadsides and songsters. The spelling of each text is kept, with Firth's titles and any date or attribution printed with the broadside given in the note; his introduction, headnotes and notes are left out. Songs whose authors Firth names appear under those poets, and ballads already held elsewhere in the archive are not repeated.