Early Broadsides (was-Music o t People)

Subject: RE: Early Broadsides (was-Music o t People)
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 Dec 10 - 06:31 AM

Yes, a very interesting contribution from Mr Howlett above.

Trouble is I met Bob Thomson several times in the late 60s/ early 70s. I realised that he was a significant figure at that time but I was too young, crass and stupid then to appreciate how significant! Has anyone heard of him recently? Last I heard he moved to the US.

Subject: RE: Early Broadsides
From: GUEST,Neil Howlett
Date: 31 Dec 10 - 07:01 AM

Steve
Although there is much evidence of distribution in print there is very little of vertical distribution (i.e., from the "squire "to the "villagers"). I recommend you read Fox (OUP print on demand) who deals with this issue lucidly. Spufford is one of those eye opening books which give a whole new vision of how early modern society worked. The evidence is of distribution networks of ballad sellers (including other itinerant traders who sold them as they travelled) organised by a veritable "tin pan alley" of publishers who held astounding levels of stock. At a penny a sheet these were accessible to many pockets, and although ephemeral "bum fodder" were then circulated locally, particularly at inns and alehouses where they would be stuck up on the wall or available to all. In such social environments it only needs one reader (and most villages had that) to make the text known to everyone. The singers themselves don't have to be literate, though they could make their own contribution to each song (cf Cox in Thompson).
Ballads seem to have been aimed at the lower end of the social scale; although they are found in gentry libraries collectors like Pepys were the exception. Indeed the alehouse was not a place that gentry would be found (though they might frequent inns and ordinaries where ballads might also be sold, displayed and sung). It was an "alternative society" (see below). The Marprelate Tracts in the late 1580s were widely distributed and noted for use of colloquial language and proverbs. They were read by all classes from the Court to the alehouse. In the most recent edition the editor emphasizes their appeal to a popular audience through reading aloud for communal enjoyment in 'a collective act of public ridicule'. (Black, J. ed. The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge, 2008) p.lxxxv,)

I am not qualified to comment on individual songs, but from what I have read the direction of transmission was almost all one way – authors were employed to write songs that were printed and distributed. There are a few old songs that become the basis for such ballads but these are the exception. They would have come from the manuscripts collected and copied by the gentry and aristocracy, but this is a literate tradition amongst the gentry. I am not aware of any evidence that gentry, authors or publishers went to the trouble of collecting sings from "folk singers" as Sharp et al.
See also
P. Clark, The Alehouse and the Alternative Society, in Pennington and K. Thomas (ed.) Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978).
Fumerton, Patricia, Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 32, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp.493-518