I see absolutely no reason why the contemporary writers on broadsides are wrong when they say, like Hindley did, that a specific group of people gained a living by writing these broadside ballads. the printers quite naturally had their businesses in towns and cities, and their song suppliers lived in reasonable proximity. the information which inspired them was readily available from a wide variety of sources, newspapers, books, even the rural people who were moving into the towns looking for work, sailors newly arrived on shore etc, in fact many were simply rewriting other broadsides. (The same plots appear over and over again, e.g., returning sailor/broken token)

The majority of the corpus seems to date from the latter half of the 18thc and the first few decades of the 19th. We can easily deduce this from their subject matter, their style and their earliest appearance, i.e., we can easily date the printer.

During this period in England the common people left in rural areas, who hadn't migrated to the horrific conditions in the cities to avoid starvation, were living in abject poverty, in working conditions verging on slavery, and literacy levels were very low. I personally can't see them spending what little leisure time they might have had writing songs, when there was a steady flow of songs ready-made, covering all subjects, coming out of the towns via the pedlars and chapmen. those lucky enough to live close enough to a town to go there once a week would have come into contact with ballad singers and patterers.

Nowhere have I said or impied that the rural population were incapable of making up songs; they simply did not have the time, or need when there was already a plentiful supply. cont....