Printed broadsides are a fascinating media on all sorts of levels and I suspect the relationship between them and oral popular song idioms of the time was symbiotic. There are examples of field recordings turning up that are pretty much exact to the Broadside version, with the singer saying that he got the words when someone wrote them down for him. I'm thinking about Jimmy Knight's singing of Out With My Gun in the Morning that appears on VOTP 18. A beautifully detailed scan of the broadside can be viewed as part of the Axon Ballad collection : http://www.chethams.org.uk/images/b104a.jpg. Hell, this is so good I've got a print of it framed on my wall.

The Broadside is just as much feral folk art as Mr Knight's performance of the song. By way of pilgrimage I once had a wander up Oxford Road to Chadderton Street trying to place T. Pearson in the grimy old buildings that still remain around there. Evocative stuff for sure given the yearning bucolic romanticism of the song that is quintessential to the folk aesthetic right down to the present day.

All of these things had authors, but even back then the very lack of a name lends the whole thing an authenticity than they would lack otherwise. Even the vignette is anonymous - as crudely charming and utterly worthy as the verses of the song itself. To think of these ventures as 'commercial' is, I think, to miss the vitality of the medium altogether and create a false opposition sadly typified in a post below. I quote:

One friend of mine, attending one of Steve Roud's courses, was devastated at being told that so many of the collected songs that we love had started life on broadsides, in the pleasure gardens, on the London stage, etc, rather than getting into print only after being made by the peasantry.