English Pre - Industrial Ballads on Poverty, 1500–1700

English Pre - IndaJtrid Balkz-ds on Poverty, UOU-1700

BY RICHARD HARVEY*

EVERAL sources-uneven in quality and bulk-are available to the student of Tudor-Stuart (pre-industrial) English poverty. They are local poor relief records; records of the central government related to poor relief; printed commentary on the problem of

poverty; and a variety of sources which defy easy categorization, such as court deposition records, censuses of the poor, and literary evidences, among them a neglected source, ballads on poverty. All of the sources just named, save ballads, are familiar. It is the purpose of this essay to assess the contribution which ballads on poverty make to our knowledge of the poor of pre-industrial England. But first, several observations must be made on the nature and significance of non-ballad evidence.

Where extant, local poor relief records such as the accounts of the overseers of the poor and the churchwardens in any one of the nine thousand plus English parishes tell us who was on relief, why he or she was on relief, the in-kind or monetary relief dispensed, and its duration.’ Parish relief was at once homely-clothing, wooden legs, fuel, burials, medical care, and monetary handouts-and indispensable.2 One can compare such records chronologically (one five- or ten-year period against another) and spatially (urban 3s. rural parishes). County quarter sessions records of the justices of the peace provide additional information on relief and on the character of the supervision which justices exercised over parish officials.3

Government at all levels in this period sought to balance a paternal concern for the relief of the poor with punitiveness toward their disorderly behavior. On the whole, however, the records of central

S

T h e author is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean of the University College, both at Ohio University.

’No better guide to parochial records exists than W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records ofParochia1 Administration in England, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 1969).

*See the references in RichardHarvey, “Recent Research on Poverty in Tudor-Stuart England Review and Commentary,” Znternational Review of Social His toy 24, no. 2

?See, for example, A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Warwickshire, 1630- (1979): 244-47.

1660,” Past and Present 35 (1966): 77-100.

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government-privy council minutes, proclamations, and statutes- exhibit a bias toward punishment. The records just named are replete with increasingly severe attitudes toward vagrancy and begging, though to be fair, they also exhibit paternal concern with finding work for the poor and for a public, rates-supported, relief system.

Contemporary commentary on poverty, in the form of tract, pamphlet, and essay, contains a blend of presumably descriptive accounts of who the poor were and why they were poor with prescriptive material on what ought to be proper policies for and attitudes toward them.‘ One can never be sure whether the descriptive accounts are empirical and based on first-hand observation, or stereotypical and based on traditional abstract images, and one can never be sure where the descriptive segment ends and the prescriptive begins in any one account. In a word, commentary is heavily freighted with ideological content which bespeaks both the power (political) relationship between the elite and the poor and the elite’s intellectual conceptions on the right ordering of the world and the social structure.

Modern historical scholarship, using the sources named above, together with other miscellaneous sources, tells us the following: that the poor of Tudor-Stuart England probably increased due to a general population increase and to agricultural change with rendered them redundant; that numerically preponderant among the poor were young people, veterans, servants, day laborers, the unskilled, and the underemployed; that in spite of the elite’s anxiety about the potential rebelliousness of the poor and the lower orders, their infrequent, local, small-scale, specific protests with their typically conservative end of restoring the traditional superior-subordinate order, attest to the extraordinary grip of elite ideology on the consciousness of the lower orders; that a tacit contract, whereby the poor as children accepted their place in the social order and the elite as fathers legitimated their place by providing relief, bound elite and poor to one another; and finally that an extraordinary effort was made (c. 1600-1725) to place that ragtag diversity of poor people into one of three administrative categories- impotent, vagrant, and able-bodied, with indoor relief, punishment, and jobs and work training, respectively, viewed as the most appropriate policies.5 With that context and background, we may now turn to a neglected source of information on the preindustrial poor, the black-letter ballad.

’Among the earliest collections of printed commentary material from the Tudor- Stuart period was Sir Frederic Morton Eden’s, TheState ofthePoor. 3 vols., a facsimileof the 1797 edition (New York, 1966).

5For an interesting, albeit brief, discussion of the family life of the poor, see Christopher Hill, “Sex, Marriage, and the Family in England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 31, no. 3 (August 1978): 450-63.

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English Ballads, 1500-1 700

The printed, broadside black-letter ballad was centered in London during its heyday, 1550-1700, when about three thousand were officially licensed, and another three to five times that many purveyed suns license. Most appeared without musical notation, although the titles of tunes to which they might be sung were often provided; and most appeared with woodcut illustrations. Their subject matter ranged from history to criminality to prodigies of nature to domestic quarrels to political propaganda. Some bore items of transient interest, other perennial. Some were traditional, meaning that they were passed along largely unchanged from generation; others were immediate records of contemporary events. Most were anonymous, “written usually by a hack versifier to a common tune, [and] sold in bookstalls or fair booths or hawked about cities and towns by street singers.”6 Even where the identity and something of the lives of the “hack versifiers” is known- men such as Thomas Deloney (c. 1543-1600), William Elderton (d. 1592?), or Martin Parker (d. 1656?)-this is little help in the complicated business of assessing the significance of their ballads. Our dual concern here is with the light which these ballads cast on poverty and the degree to which ballad content jibes with what modem historical scholarship has learned of pre-industrial English poverty. The first great collectors of popular ballads in the seventeenth century certainly believed ballads to be significant for public opinion. John Selden (1584-1654), who began what was to become the splendid Pepys collection of ballads, now housed at Magdalene, Cambridge, once said, “More solid things do not show the Complexion of the times so well as Ballads.”’ A recent student has echoed that view: “The broadside ballad is both a conditioner anda mirror of popular attitudes.”E Other modern students have agreed said

Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, N.J., 1966), ix. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth suggested that therelativepoverty anddeficient education of the ballad makers, though not themselves of the poor, enabled them to understand and to communicate the experience of the poor, albeit in dramatic, lyrical form. The Bagford Ballads: Zllustrating the Last Years of thestuarts, ed. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth (Hertford, England, 1878), xiv. For information on Restoration printers and publishers of ballads, see Cyprian Blagden, “Notes on the Ballad Market in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Bibliography 6 (1953-54), 161-80.

7 J ~ h n Selden, Table Talk: Being the Discourses of fohn Setden, Esq. (London, 1689), 76.

%impson, British Broadside Ballad, xi. See Victor Neuberg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1977), 60-62, for a brief description of the major collections. For other introductions to the black-letter ballad, see Reginald Nettel, Sing a Song of England: A Social History of TraditionalSong (London, 1954); Evelyn Kendrick Wells, The Ballad Tree: A Study of British and American Ballads, Their Folklore, Verse, and Music (New York, 1950); and Peter J. Seng, ed., Tudor Songs and Ballah from Ms. Cotton Vespasian A-25 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Hyder Rollins has made an extraordinary contribution to ballad study. Among themost usefulof hisstudies

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Ebsworth, “For middle-class and poverty, no records equal those we find in the street-ballads.”g Said Gerould: “Their worth is inestimable in more ways than one, because they reflect not only the opinions and feelings of ordinary folk but their beliefs and customs as well.l0

From.the bulk of early Tudor ballads on poverty, several may be identified as particularly significant. They are “Ruyn’ of a Realm” (c. 15 10-1530)11; “Now a Dayes” (Henrician period);lz “Dives and Lazarus” (155Os);ls and “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (late 154Os).l4 The poorappear in those ballads as a traditional element in the organic social order, to whom charitableness was enjoined but for whom charity had diminished-partly because the numbers of the poor had increased. The main complaint was that the social order had entered a state of disarray-of moral disequilibrium-which for the poor meant greater deprivation. Among significant later Tudor ballads on poverty are “The Maner of the World now a Dayes” (late 1550s);15 “No Wight in this world that wealth can attain” (1560s);’b “A New Yeres Gift, intituled, A

are “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 34 (1919): 258-339, and An Analytical Index to the Ballad Entries(1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Hatboro, Pa. 1967).

9Bagford Ballads, xv. loGordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932), 133-34. ”“The Ruyn’ of a Realm,” Harleian MS. 2252, folios 25-28, British Library (BL),

and F. J. Fumivall, ed., Ballads from Manuscript, vol. 1 (London, 1868-72), lines 155-61, p. 163. “The men and women of late medieval England were quite capable of, were indeed habitually given to, embalming general principles in traditional foms and thereby isolating them quite effectively from the contingencies of daily existence.” So says Arthur B. Ferguson, The Zndian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, N.C., 1960), 27.

‘*“Now a Dayes,” Lambeth MS. 159, folio 261, and Furnivall, ed., Ballads, 1: 94, lines 45.48. See C. H. Firth, “The Ballad History of the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser., 2 (1908): 34-35, for a brief comment.

’$“Dives and Lazarus,” in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, vol. 2 (Boston, 1885), 11.

14“V0x Populi, Vox Die,” in Harleian MS. 367, folios 130-43, BL; Fumivall, ed., Ballads, 1: 139. For a brief comment, seeC. H. Firth, “TheBalladHistoryof theReignsof the Later Tudors,’’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser, 3 (1909): 54-55.

15“The Maner of the World now a Dayes,” in Sloan MS. 747, folios 88-89, B L J. P. Collier, ed., Old Ballads (London, 1840), 1:2. See “The New Guyse now a Dayes,” in Broadside Black Letter Ballads, Printed in the Sixteenth and Seuenteenth Centuries: Chiefly in the Possession of J . Payne Collier (London, 1868).

I6“No Wight in this world that wealth can attain,” in Add. MSS. 15225, folios 7-9, BL; H. Rollins, ed., Old English Ballads, 1553-1625, chiefly from manuscripts (Cambridge, 1930), 109.

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Christal glas for all Estates to look in” ( 1569);17 “The Crie of the Poore for the Death of the Right Honourable Earle of Huntington” (1596);1* and “The Poore Peoples complaynt: Bewayling the death of their famous benefactor, the worthy Earle of Bedford” (late 1580s).’9

Those ballads, like the earlier, reflect contemporary belief in an organic social order. That order had its various parts, stations, relationships, and responsibilities, all knit together by an overriding moral purpose, the nurturance of the spiritual life of men during their earthly existence. The nobility, or political order, the clergy, or religious order, and the commons, or laboring order, owed one another, as orders and as individuals, the services assigned to their respective stations. The commons, especially the poorer sort, were to be looked after by the well-to-do, and the church was to see to it that certain standards of charitableness were maintained. The poor, in turn, were expected to be Christian, and to accept their lot and the relief dispensed to them by their betters. Wealth had social responsibilities, and individuals-whether nobles or merchants-could not do with it what they willed without violating traditional norms.

The world of smoothly functioning organic order is not the world described by the ballads. The moral world depicted there was in the process of disintegration. Social relations were disrupted; responsibilities were no longer carried out; poverty and severe deprivation had become more widespread, and disorientation was rife. Tudor ballads assigned this general cause to the decline: sinful pride, greed (covetousness), and especially the private view of wealth as free of social restrictions had produced a generalized waning of mutuality in the social order. An organic social order’s abiding anxiety about individual self-interestedness had become a monstrous reality. The poor were the chief victims.

The poor of Tudor ballads are anonymous and abstract. They appear as one of the natural orders of society-nobility, clergy, commons, the poor. They do not appear as individuals. Their life

‘7“A New Yeres Gift, intituled, A Christal glas for all Estates to look in,” formerly in Heber Collection, now at Britwell Court, Buckinghamshire with copy in British Library (C.IOl.h.lO), and H. L. Collrnann, ed., Ballads and Broadsides chiefly oftheElizabethan period and printed in Black-Letter (Oxford, 1912), 129-31.

I8‘‘The Crie of the Poore for the Death of the Right Honourable Earle of Huntington,” formerly in collection of George Daniel, purchased by Henry Huth for British Library ( 1 1622. c. 6), and J . Lilly, ed., A Collection of 79 Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides, printed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, between the years 1559 and 1597 (London, 1867), 228-31.

1g‘‘The Poore Peoples Complaynt: Bewayling the death of their famous benefactor, the worthy Earle of Bedford,” in Earl of Macclesfields Library at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, with copy in British Library (1 1603. g. 28). and A. Clark, ed., TheShirburn Ballads, 1558-1616 (Oxford, 1907), 259.

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experiences receive no attention. A “culture of poverty” is missing. Remarkably, in the following, early Stuart phase of the ballad history of the poor, c. 1600-1660, the poor become flesh and blood figures in areal world of deprivation complete with self-perceptions and attitudes toward their betters. Why this change occurred is not clear. What is clear is the substantial difference between Tudor and early Stuart ballads in their depiction of the poor.

One of the most interesting of the early Stuart ballads on poverty2O is entitled “A New Ballad, shewing the great misery sustained by a poore man in Essex, his wife and children, with other strange doings done by the Devill.”z1 The 1620s appear to have been the period of its publication. It tells the doleful tale of the husband and father of an extremely poor, large, rural family, during one of its periods of desperate privation. The wife had lately given birth again:

His silly wife, God wot being lately brought to bed

With her poore infants at her brest had neither drinke nor bread.22

The specter of starvation hovered over his children:

They came about him round upon his coat they hung:

And pittiously they made their mone; their little hands they wrung.23

While searching in a nearby forest for wood and acorns “for to rost,” he came upon some farmers whose help he implored:

“0 lend to me,” he said, “one loafe of barley bread,

One pint of milke for my poor wife, in child-bed almost dead;

Thinke on my extreme need, to lend me have no doubt-

I have no money for to pay- but I will worke i t out.”2*

2oFor an introduction to Stuart poor relief, see G. W. Oxley, Poor Relief in England and Wales, 1601-1834 (London, 1974).

21“A New Ballad, Shewing the great misery sustained by a poore man in Essex, his wife and children, with other strange thingsdone by theDevill,” TheRoxburgheBallads, with short notes by William Chappell (Hertford, England, 1874), 2: 222-28. Due to the deteriorating condition of the original ballads, the British Library has placed the entire Roxburghe collection on microfilm.

2*Zbid., lines 9ff. 23Zbid., lines 25ff. Z‘Zbid., lines 41ff.

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They denied him, but his luck seemed to turn when he met a tall man “and Cole-black were his garments all,” who first teased him that since his want was so great, he must bea sinner. The poor man replied that the “godly oft doe want, and need doth pinch them sore.” (It should be pointed out that thisexhange between the tall man, or the Devil, and the poor man reveals an early seventeenth-century concern for the relationship between virtuousness, or Godliness, and material success. Was poverty a material sign of God’s displeasure? Was prosperity a material sign of God’s favor? Or, to put it in other words, was poverty to be ascribed to the moral deficiency of the poor-the Victorian “truism”-and prosperity to the moral superiority of the comfortable classes? No question was more debated throughout the century.) On returning home, the gold given to the poor man by the devil turned out to be “nothing but oken leaves, bound in a filthy clout.” The trick drove the poor man mad, at which point “the chiefest man that in the parish dwelt” brought “meat and mony thither.” The lesson is pointed in the last stanza:

From all temptations [then] Lord, blesse both great and small;

And let no man, 0 heavenly God, for want of succour fall;

But put their special1 trust in God for evermore,

Who will no doubt from misery, each faithful man

Two observations may be made. One, the details of the story itself engage our attention: the large family, the bedridden wife, the hunger of the children, the search for acorns to roast and for wood to burn, the denial of assistance by the farmers, and the charitable obligations met by the “chiefest man” are not at variance with what we know of parish poverty and ad hoc poor relief in the villages of England in the early seventeenth century. Two, note that succor did come but not before the poor man was driven mad either by his privations or by the Devil’s knavery, or both; and not before the ballad makes i t clear that the man’s privations were not penalties for his sins, that he was in fact a good man being sorely tried by God, like Job. Thus, one of the ballad’s lessons, perhaps indeed the most important, was that the poor should trust in God and that that trust would see them through their severest trials, either in the sense of psychological support or in the sense of material succor, providentially granted.

“Ragged, Torne, and True; Or, The Poore Man’s Resolution”26 also

Wbid., lines 177ff. Z6“Ragged, Tome, and True; Or, The Pmre Man’s Resolution,” The Roxburghe

Ballads, 2: 408-13.

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dates from the time of James I and Charles I (1603-49). It takes the form of a statement, indeed of a manifesto, of a poor man to the world. This poor man is not a vagrant; he is not a member of that shadowy world of the criminal poor. He is an honest poor man:

God knowes, And all my neighbors can tell

I want both money and clothes, And yet I live wondrous well:

I have a contented mind, And a heart to beare out all,

Though Fortune (being unkind) Hath given me substance small.27

The ragged, torn, and true poor man then goes on to contrast his life- style to those of sundry other social types of the day. Those who live “by the shift” or “sinister dealing,” by flattery, stealing, bribery, or cheating, those who live by gambling-“at cardes and dice, 0, fie on that lawlesse gaine got by such wicked vice1”-or picking pockets, all those whose gain is ill-gotten are morally inferior to the honest poor man and thus are strongly censured by the narrator in the ballad. Even if they evade the gallows or the stocks,

Their conscience doth them accuse,

While he that doth no man abuse And they quake at the noise of a bush,

For the law needs not care a rush.28

“Tis good to be honest and just, Though a man be never so poore” says the narrator, who ends each stanza with “Ime ragged, and torne, and true.”

This poor man was humble and honest. He was proudof the station which Fortune had given him. He was content. He was accepting. He was not envious of his material betters. He was staunch. What is especially interesting is that the poor man, who is in all respects inferior in status to the gallants and others mentioned in the ballad, emerges quite clearly as morally superior to them. They were parasitic; they did not perform honest labor; their livelihood came through theft of one form or another. They were liable to twinges of conscience. They suffered criminal punishments when apprehended. The case made against their wicked behavior is a strong one. But there is more to it than that. The ballad serves to articulate a particular type of pre-industrial poverty. It is the poverty of the small farmer, the urban or rural laborer, the craftsman, and the shopkeeper. In better times, before the economic

271bid., lines Iff . ?bid., lines 101B.

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change of the day or their own deficiencies had plunged them into a kind of genteel destitution, they had known the valueof work and thrift and the meaning of honesty and pride. This point of view, that of the nouveuux puuvres, continued to find expression in this period through the voice of the nouveuux puuvres, and is particularly clear in this early Stuart ballad “Ragged, Torne, and True.”

“The begger-boy of the North: Whose linage and calling to th’ world is proclaim’d, Which is to be sung to aTune so nam’d’zg is a ballad story told by the beggar-boy of the North, who came, so he says, from a long line of proud beggars. The beggar-boy brags of the ease with which he makes his way in the world

Though but a boy, I am sturdy and stout, A living by begging I easily procure:

My skin is made like armour of proofe By sun nor frost ’t will never be broken.50

And again: I’ th’ heat of the summer I lead a fine life,

To walke the green medowes for my re~reat ion.~~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All the cold winter I keepe rendevouse, In an old spacious barne by beggers frequented?

He is the master of a variety of tricks designed to elicit sympathy, and thus alms, from repectable people on the streets.

To whet your charity, I have a tricke, A tricke, said I? Nay, I have a hundred:

With a cap on my head, I can faine to be sicke, To see my strange gestures the people have wond’red

I can counterfeit a lame arme or a legge, And sometimes He seeme like one that is broken;

This must he doe that exactly will begge, And ay, “Good your worship, bestow one token!”s3

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I can hold my fingers as though they were lame,

And under a hedge a gybe34 I can frame, Lest people should say I were able to labour;

29“The Begger-boy of the North: Whole linage and calling to th’ world is proclaim’d, Which is to be sung to a Tune so nam’d,” The Roxburghe Ballads, 3: 322-28.

Solbid., lines llff. S‘lbid., lines 73ff. 321bid., lines 81ff. Sslbid., lines 33ff. 34Gybe: fraudulent document.

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As though it were writ by the justices’ favour;

My wants in blacke and white are spoken;

And still I doe ay, “Good your worship, one token!”35

From Parish to parish along as I rome,

Goe where I will, I am alwayes at home,

This ballad is one of a number which compare other life styles and livelihoods to those of the poor. Here, the point is made that the beggar has more land than the greatest landholder of England. He has the whole of England in which to live and to ply his craft. In two other ways he is different from the landholder: one, “I wrong not the country by greedy enclosing,” and two, “I am no other than what I pretend.” Thus, he has freedom: he can roam at will over the whole of the land, and live off of it easily. He is not guilty of those evils of the day presumed to spring from the enclosing of fields and commons-depopulation, rack- renting, ruination of small farmers and laborers, and the like. And he is a plain, unpretentious person, uncorrupted by wealth and property and possessions. The beggar-boy speaks as one possessed of a high degree of self-knowledge, one who knows what is important and what is not. His is not the world of the poor family of Essex, nor is it the world of the honest, industrious poor man-old Ragged, Torne and True. This ballad, then, obliquely reveals yet another facet of the experience of the poor in the seventeenth century.

The middle 1630s saw the publication of a balladquite similar to the “Beggar-boy of the North.” “The Cunning Northern Beggar”S6 scorns work, is indifferent to status (“A fig for high preferments”), dresses in rags, and has no cares, His specialty is the crafty use of an array of deceptions to produce alms. Among his impersonations were those of a wandering soldier, a sailor, and a cripple.

My flesh I so can temper That it shall seeme to feister [fester]

And looke all or’e Like a raw sore,

Whereon I sticke a plaister [bandage]. With blood I daub my face then, To faigne the falling sicknesse,

That in every place They pitty my case37

35“The Beggar-boy of the North,” lines 41ff. 36“The Cunning Northern Beggar,” RoxburgheBallads, 1: 137-41, reprintedinc. J.

Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging(London, 1887), 609-12.

SVbid., lines 78-86.

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A blind man and that of a person who had suffered a disastrous fire were other roles in his repertoire. He concludes with,

Tis better to be a Beggar, And aske of kinde goode fellowes

And honestly have What we doe crave

Then steale and goe to th’ Gallowes.38

A variation on the theme of the frauds used by beggars to prick the consciences of the rich was developed in “A New Ballad intituled, The Stout Criple of Cornwall, wherein is shewed his dissolute life and deserved death.”39 In this ballad, however, the narrator stands for law and order, for respectable society, and thus displays no sympathy or admiration for the feats or final end of the stout cripple. The protagonist is a highwayman at night, who feigns being a crippled beggar during the day.

He crept on his hands and his knees up and downe, In a torn jacket and ragged patcht gowne; For he had never a leg to the knee- The Cripple of Cornwall sirnamed was he.40

Thus all the day long he beg’d for relief And late in the night he plai’d the false theefe; And seven years together this custom kept he And no man thought him such a person to be.41

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

His ruse was successful. The ballad relates his exploits and how it was that he met his end. While begging at the gate of Lord Courtney, he learned that the lord planned to take a handsome amount of gold and silver with him on a journey to Exeter. The stout cripple and his mates conspired to intercept the lord and to relieve him of his burden. The holdup was staged. Men on both sides died. The cripple escaped

And over a river that run there beside, Which was very deep and eighteen foot wide. With his long staff and his stilts leaped he, And shifted himself in an old hollow tree.42

As time passed, the cripple as highwayman increased the size of his

s*Ibid., lines I29-33. 59“A New Ballad, intituled, The Stout Criple of Cornwall, where in is shewed his

“Vbid., lines 5ff. “Ibid., lines 21ff. ‘ZIbid., lines 65ff.

dissolute life and deserved death.” Roxburghe Ballads, 2: 531-35.

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hoard-“Nine hundred pound this Cripple had got, By Begging and thieveing-so good was his lot.” He resolved to “quite give over his trade” as soon as he had put by one thousand pounds. In this endeavor, he became more and more rash, until

At last he was taken, the law to suffice, Condemned and hanged at Exeter ’size [court].

Which made all men amazed to see, That such an impotent person as he, Should venture himself in such action as they, T o rob in such sort upon the hye-way.’J

Crime paid, apparently, but only in the short run. Had the highwayman been content with nine hundred pounds, he could have given up both his trades and lived in leisure. The ballad suggests that the defect of character which led the cripple to crime led him on to his violent end. The additional suggestion was that beggars were beyond the pale of respectable society in three distinct senses: (1) as poor people they occupied the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and economically, they were dependents of others; (2) as beggars, they were liable to be perceived as frauds using their dissembled roles to milk charity from the rich; and (5) counterfeit beggars were thought to move easily back and forth between the worlds of the “deserving poor” and the criminal poor. Thus, any one poor person was apt to be perceived as at once an outcast, a deceiver, and a criminal. Seventeenth-century attitudes did become more harsh toward the work-shy, criminal, and vagrant poor.

At some considerable distance from the criminality of the cripple of Cornwall stood the image of the poor as happy agricultural laborers. “The Countrey Peoples Felicity. Or, A Brief Description of Pleasure”44 is a ballad depiction of what the rural laborer’s life was or should be like. First, a strong sense of community and neighborly good feeling is conveyed by the ballad. The work is hard but healthful. Its scene is a sun-splashed hay field. The workers, male and female, are industrious, not shirkers. They are certainly not criminal or even dishonest. Indeed, one of the apparent purposes of the ballad was to hold up an image of what work ought to be like, not, however, as the workers themselves might have planned it but from the point of view of an outsider, probably an urban outsider. Periods of ease were filled with song, music, the quaffing of brown ale, and flirting among the young people.

Second, the ballad suggests that this work meets both economic and

‘Vbid., lines 95ff. ““The Countrey People Felicity. Or, A Brief Description of Pleasure,” in A

Collection of Ballads (BL LR. 407. h7. 4 9 Xerox copy of ms.).

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human needs. The work is fulfilling. It contributes to the economicand social well-being of the whole of society. The social order is organic in nature: the male and female laborers of the ballad perform the work of their station or calling in a cooperative spirit. No resentment, no class antagonism, no rebelliousness mar the idyllic scene and its relationships. This ballad’s romantic tenor is sharply divergent from that of those already c~nsidered.~~

Hospitality had two different meanings in pre-industrial England. On the one hand, it meant that owners of substantial estates in the countryside spent lavishly on entertainment and food for their peers. They were expected to do so. The higher one’s status, the more one was expected to lay out on such expenditures. To label this behavior

conspicuous consumption” is not anachronistic. Of course, this particular social custom had its corrupt side in that families which aspired to high status could try to spend their way to that higher status by outdoing their neighbors in the munificence of their hospitality. The evidence indicates that social pressures-from peers and on those who wanted to rise in the social hierarchy-often took hospitality to its extremes, and thus drove a good many families to the wall. The second meaning of hospitality had a noblesse oblige ring to it. Here the meaning was the bestowal of assistance on the needy of one’s neighborhood. It is easy to see some of the possible interconnections between the two meanings or practices of hospitality. For example, the more a noble family spent on hospitality in competition with its neighbors, the less i t would have to give to the poor.

One of the commonest complaints running through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England was the decline in hospitality offered to the poor. The monasteries, dissolved by the state in the 1530s, traditionally had been providers of hospitality to the poor at their gates. That hospitality ceased, of course, at the dissolution. Noble households, too, had become delinquent in their duties, according to commentators. “The Map of Mock-beggar Hall, with his situation in the spacious Countrey called Anywhere”46 records that common complaint.

I ‘

I reade, in ancient times of yore, That men of worthy calling

Built almes-houses and spittle [hostels] store, Which now are all downe falling4’

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45For an excellent recent discussion of the history of work and, more important, attitudes toward it, see Alasdair Clayre, Work and Play: Ideas and Experience of Work and Leisure (New York, 1976).

““The Map of Mock-beggar Hall, with his situation in thespaciouscountrey called Anywhere,’.’ Roxburghe Ballads, 2: 131-36.

4Vbid., lines I f f .

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Farme-houses which their fathers built, And land, well kept by tillage,

Their prodigal1 sons have sold for gilt, In every towne and village.

To th’ city and court they doe resort, With gold and silver plenty4*

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Their fathers went in homely frieze,

Their stockings with the same agrees, And good plaine broad-cloth breeches,

Sow’d on with good strong stitches.49

Thus, the complaint was that the great landholders were no longer attentive to the needs of the poor. They were neglecting their paternal duties. The relief buildings which had been provided earlier were now in a state of disrepair. Fathers and sons tended to leave the countryside and to hang out in London and at the court. Landholders were no longer plain clothed gentlemen, but pretentious dandies. They had built new homes, presumably in London, which the ballad labels mock- beggar halls, because there beggars were ignored.

Thus in these times we can perceive, Small charity comfort yielding

For pride doth men of grace bereave, Not only in cloathes, but in building;

Man makes the senselesse stones and bricke, Which by heaven’s goodnesse lent be,

Expresse his pride by these vaine tri~ks.5~

The poor relief referred to in the mock-beggar hall ballad was wadi tional poor relief based both on the religious duties of the Christian and the secular duties of the landholder. Poor relief was voluntary; it had to do with traditional obligations and expectations. It presupposed an unchanging social order, the unchanging nature of relationships within the social order, and an unchanging economic order. The social order was changing: gentry (non-aristocratic great landholders) were becoming more important economically and politically; professional men, particularly lawyers, were becoming wealthier and politically conscious; the poor were becoming more numerous. Commercial farming was becoming more prevalent with the increased demand for foodstuffs to feed a larger population. Dislocations resulted. Litigation resulted. Lawyers prospered. Vagabondage increased. A national

481bid., lines 9ff. ‘glbid., lines 25ff. 5oIbid., lines 89ff.

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welfare system came into being, based on coercive taxing authority. “The Map of Mock-beggar Hall” refers to the past and, one may conjecture, to the quietly continuous reality of poverty and poor relief in the countryside.

Finally, a most unusual ballad must be considered. Its title, “The Poore Man Payes for All: This is but a dreame which here shall insue, But the Author wishes his words were not true.”51 The narrator dreamt the following:

That poore men still inforced are

Me thought I heard them weeping say, T o pay more than they are able:

Their substance was but sma1P

Me thought I saw how wealthy men Did grind the poore men’s faces,

And greedily did prey on them, Not pittying their cases

They make them toyle and labour sore For wages too-too sma11.53

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A usurer walked in his dream, “His wealth he by extortion got.” A courtier swaggered, “Me thought, wert not for bribery, His peacock’s plumes would fall.” He met poor men in his dream whose rents were being racked, i.e., increased exorbitantly. Fashionable women indulged in conspicuous consumption. Shopkeepers and lawyers cheated their clients. And in the countryside,

Where poore men take great paines,

Onely for rich men’s gaines:

The poor are kept in

And labour hard continually,

Like the Israelites in Egypt,

Finally,

Even as the mighty fishes still Doe feed upon the lesse;

So rich men, might they have their will, Would on the poore men c ~ s s : ~ ~

It is a proverbe old and true-

51“The Poore Man Pays for All. This is but a dreame which here shall insue, But the

54bid., lines 19ff. Sslbid., lines 25ff. -Vbid., lines 66ff. 55Cess: levy upon or oppress.

Author wishes his words were not true.” Roxburghe Ballads, 2 334-38.

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That weakest goe to th’ wall;

But poore men pay for alL56 Rich men can drink till th’ sky looke blue,

Here the authentic underclass is heard, or, if not that, the authentic voice of the self-appointed tribune of the poor. No romanticism, no sentimentality, no nostalgia are to be found in this ballad. The past was the time reference of “The Map of Mock-beggar Hall;” the present is the time reference of “The Poore Man Pays for All.” The ballad protests that the poor are preyed upon from many different directions, but principally by those who hire their labor. In effect, the assumption was that the poor had only two assets: their unskilled labor and the kindly, charitable attitudes of others toward them. In the view of the narrator, neither asset of the poor produced a fair return. Their labor was underpaid; and their condition was unpitied. The rich had become extravagant; their charity niggardly. They had lost all sense of social responsibility. They competed with one another. The poor suffered. The ballad is unusual in that i t seeks to clarify therelationship between rich and poor, not straightforwardly and sharply, but indirectly, through the device of irony. The exploitation of the poor by the rich appeared in a dream, not in real life. The implication was that such was not the case in waking life. However, ballads of the Restoration represent a shift from these and from earlier emphases.

Like their counterparts in the Tudor (1500-1600) and early Stuart (1600-60) periods, ballads on the poor of the Restoration period in English history (1660-1700) fall into a number of natural categories. Three, particularly, demand attention: ballads dealing with the lives and customs of beggars; ballads dealing with the causes and effects of poverty in England; and arguably the most significant category] ballads dealing with lessons for the poor and the working classes on the values thought particularly appropriate for them.

Ballads dealing with the lives and customs of beggars had a history extending back into the Tudor period. The bulk of these Tudor ballads depicted the beggar as a confident, unrepentant male (never female) who scorned the ways and values of those upon whom he preyed. Whether making his way round the countryside, sometimes with the aid of a forged document, and settling down in an abandoned barn at day’s end in the summer, or spending most of the winter in the ale-house, the beggar of these ballads was as much actor as beggar in his use of a variety of disguises and ruses to elicit the sympathy and charity of the respectable classes.57 He used his tricks effectively] and boasted of his

56“The Poore Man,” lines 105ff. 57Certainly ample evidence for this behavior exists in the literature on vagrancy. See

Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887), passim.

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skill. (No notice was taken in those ballads of the truly destitute.) Such ballads continued to appear in the Restoration, but they appeared less frequently than earlier. Why that was so is hard to say. “The Merry Beggars of Lincolns-Inn-Fields”5* has as its refrain, “Good Master- Spare a farthing.” These beggars, so the balladgoes, have their crutches, their bogus infirmities-blindness, for example, their disguises as distressed seamen, and their incessant bawling in the streets. Following a successful day in the streets, they spend their alms in the ale-house, regaling one another with tales of how they gulled the public. Another day finds them again in the street with their tricks “to pay our drunken score. ’ ’ “The Beggars Song, Both in City and Co~nt ry”5~ is a similar ballad. These beggars live a life of constant leisure. They disdain physical labor. They are dependent only on “dame Nature,” not on their superiors. Leisure not work, dependency on nature, and independence of other persons were the main features of their lives. Starker contrasts with the typical life of the lower classes could not be drawn. It was accepted that, since Adam, the lowest reaches of the social order were fated to work and to be dependent on their social superiors for employment and poor relief. For beggars to claim that they didnot have to work and that they were not dependent was shocking: it placed them totally beyond the pale of respectable society. This ballad tells their story: while steering clear of magistrates, they helped themselves to water and fruit in the countryside. On one occasion, they stole a fat pig, took i t to the next town to have it dressed, and gave the butcher the best of the cuts for his labors. Geese and hen chickens also appearedon their menus. They lived in barns and hedges. Winters were spent in alms-generous London. Whatever the season, they were merry and led a most carefree life. The beggars in these ballads are at once more fortunate than the other poor, in that their lives are not severely deprived, and the non-poor, in that they had no cares. These ballads do reflect, though distortedly, the experience of one segment of the nation’s poor during the Restoration; they are not pure fantasy. The records of the Restoration magistracy (law enforcement officials) indicate the existence of beggars of the sort depicted in the ballad. It is important to note however, that these ballads were not written by the poor themselves but by the lower middle-class interpreters of the experience of the poor, whose understanding of the poor and of poverty varied enormously and whose perceptions were those of the lower middle class and not those of the destitute. It is probable that the beggars in these ballads were the

5a‘‘The Merry Beggars of Lincolns-Inn Fields,” in T h e Pepys Ballad Collection, vol. 4, no. 252 (BL LR. 408, n.1); originals of this collection in the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

59“The Beggars Song, Both in City andcountry,” in Pepys Ballad Collection, vol. 4, no. 442.

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mythologized opposites of middle-class man, opposites which may have been viewed quite ambivalently. The image of the poor man without cares, without work, and without responsibilities would have been deeply envied; but i t also would have drawn contempt for its irresponsibleness and for its implied threat to middle-class values.

Next, we can take up those Restoration ballads which deal with the causes and efiects of poverty. The first, “TheTroubles of this World; Or, Nothing Cheap But Poor Mens Labour,”GO is interesting, apart from its title, for its analysis of the effects of war on the English economy. Two effects, in particular, received notice: inflation and the stagnation of charitable giving. Inflation raised prices for everyone, including poor laborers, cheapened their wages, and at the same time diminished the sums which the charitable were wont to dispense. The second ballad, “The Present State of England Containing the Poor Mans Complaint in a Land of Plenty,”61 cited war and poverty as the principal ills afflicting the land. This ballad believed that Christian conscience and brotherly love no longer tempered the fiercer appetites of men. The poor, especially, were the victims. The ballad concluded with, “Base covetousness is the cause of our grief, and the poor they do languish for want of relief.” Finally, in this category of ballads, stands “Pitties Lamentation for the Cruelty of this Age.”@ It is said that fraud and deceit were rampant. All sins were committed. Conscience had disappeared. Consumption was conspicuous. Pity (meaning compassion) for the poor was nonexistent. A rather vague nostalgia combined with an acerbic enumeration of the ills of the day characterize this ballad. With this group it is possible to see a rather different service being performed by the ballad. One can hardly say that they are entertaining, at least in any obvious way. On the contrary, they are sermon-like in the heat, not light; in thevagueness, not sharpness; in the nostalgia, not realism which they brought to the subject matter of Restoration poverty.

We can now turn to what is arguably the most important of the three categories of Restoration ballads on poverty, those which bore lessons for the poor. And perhaps that category’s most appropriate text is an observation made by Andrew Fletcher, “I knew a very wise man that. . . believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”63 What began to happen in the

60“The troubles of this World Or, Nothing Cheap but Poor Mens Labour,’’ in Pepys

61“The Present Stateof England Containing the Poor Mans Complaint in aLandof

62“Pitties Lamentation for the Cruelty of this Age” in Pepys Ballad Collection, vol.

631n 1703, as quoted by Rollins, “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad,” 280.

Ballad Collection, vol. 2, no. 87.

Plenty,” in Pepys Ballad Collection, vol. 2, no. 77.

1, no. 162-63.

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English Ballads, 1500-1 700

seventeenth century was as remarkable as it was necessary: the creation of an integrated set of attitudes for the poor viewed as potential working classes. This was the first time in human history that such an effort had been undertaken, designed literally to create the working classes. It was necessary in light of later history: proper attitudes for the working classes were indispensable to the success of industrialization in England a generation or two later. Not only ballads were used in the effort, but Restoration ballads do reflect what was undertaken. They contain lessons on attitudes towards work, wealth, employers, the future, children, leisure, adversity, and God. Taken together, such attitudes as were urged in the ballads were meant to fit the working classes in England to play a productive and stable role in the economy and the social order.

First, what attitude toward work is to be found in these ballads? Competence in a variety of jobs was seen as a desirable trait among the working classes. Since the settings are rural only, the range of jobs indicated is rural only. The rural laborer was expected to know reaping, mowing, harrowing, sowing, hedging, ditching, threshing, plowing, and the like. He was to be jack-of-all-trades and master of them as well. Not only that: he was expected to perform those tasks cheerfully, the tediousness and the fatiguing nature of the work notwithstanding-“As cheerful as those that had hundreds a year.”6* He was to be jolly at his work, to whistle and sing, and to perform his work briskly. In a word, the poor laborers were expected to be industrious and cheerful, not “lazy drones.” They were to regard the unpleasant, more arduous, aspect of their work stoically. Thus, while the tasks to be performed were still agrarian, the attitudes thought proper were “industrial.”

The worker’s attitude toward his employer was of a piece. with his attitude toward his work. It was to be accepting, and more than that, deferential. He was not to envy his employer’s style of life. Indeed, the poor laboring folk in the ballads are sometimes even contemptuous of the life style, especially the diet, of the rich. They profess contentment with their own diet and suggest that it may be superior to that of the weal thy:

A dinner of herbs with content serves as well as all the rich dainties in which fat doth e ~ c e l l . ~ ~

The laborer’s attitude toward wealth was to be one befitting his station. That is, he must be content with little. And he must accept that however hard he may work, he will always be poor. Indeed, a good deal

64“The Nobe [Noble] Mans Generous Kindness . . .,” in A Collection of [MS.]

65“The Poor Mans Councellor: Or the Manyed Man Guide,” in Pepys Ballad Ballads, no. 157 (British Library, c. 22. f. 6.).

Collection, vol. 2, no. 86, lines 65-66.

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of stress was placed on the hard-earned penny. Both the energy expended in earning it and its possession became especially virtuous in the ballads:

A penny hard earned since it is thy jot, Will do thee more good than a pound thats ill got.66

Just as the diet of the non-poor was thought to be unhealthful, so too profits earned by the non-poor were widely thought to be ill-got and burdensome. The ballads also suggest that wealth bewitches; wealth corrupts; wealth is difficult to control; and wealth brings special cares and worries.

“A little is better with peace and content, Then [than] wealth in abundance in misery spent.”67

Frugality was to be central in the poor man’s attitude toward wealth. He was expected to save all that he could. He was to live simply, to take simple pleasures-not going to the ale house, for example, but having a cup of “good liquor” at home with his wife. Finally, he was to regard his children, his family, his home life as his true riches-and in those, he was as rich as any man in England. The children were to be taught trades. Toward the future and toward adversity-the latter likely to be the nature of the former-the poor laborer was expected to be stoical.68 He was to bear hard labor and poverty without breaking, i.e., without losing his deferential attitude toward his superiors, without becoming envious, and without becoming rebellious. Above all, he was expected to continue to trust in God and to remember, in adversity, the lesson of Job.

Therefore be content with a lowly degree, and good [God] will provide for thy children and thee.69

Thus, hard work, stoicism, frugality, and deference were necessary. But in the end, the life of the poor laborer revolved, or ought to revolve, around trust in God for his well-being and the well-being of his family.70

What may reasonably be concluded from these observations on Tudor-Stuart ballads on poverty? To what extent are those ballads adduced as evidence in this study representative of reality and to what

661bid., lines 33-34. Wbid., lines 11-12. 68“The Poor Mans Comfort,” in Pefiys Ballad Collection, vol. 4, no. 91. G91bid., lines 17-18. ?%See “Old Christmas Returned, Or, Hospitality Revived” in The Pepys Ballad

Collection, vol. 1 , no. 1031, for a model image of a harmonious social order.

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extent do they corroborate what scholarship based on traditional evidence tells us? Fundamentally, can they help us toward a better understanding of pre-industrial English poverty?

First, any historian worth his salt possesses a special sensitivity to the incongruous, to that which does not fit, to that which appears to run counter to common sense. To the unique, he may react with bafflement or bemusement, but he will not seek to round off the edges of uniquely square pegs to fit round holes. The most striking anomaly in the study of early modern ballads on poverty is the unrelatedness of the content of those ballads to what is thought important by most modern historians of poverty. The ballads of the Tudor period (1485-1603) do not mention Tudor politics, the price revolution, or the Reformation. Nor do they mention commonplace aspects of the history of the poor in the sixteenth century, such as the development of urban hospitals (hostels) for the poor; the emergence of a taxonomy of the poor (able-bodied and impotent); the appearance of a national welfare system, together with poor rates (taxes) and a poor relief administrative structure by the end of the sixteenth century; and the increasingly serious problem of vagrancy in the Tudor-Stuart era (1500-1700). Rather, Tudor ballads on poverty were preoccupied with the stark difference between their world and an earlier, better world. The differences were chiefly moral. Earlier virtues and duties had fallen into desuetude, leaving corruption, materialism, selfishness, and greater deprivation for England’s poor. The tenor of the Tudor ballads on poverty was markedly moralistic.

Stuart ballads on poverty (1603-60) are similarly anomalous. They bear no references to the political and religious struggles of the time, which culminated in civil war, revolution, the killing of a king, Charles I, the abolition and restoration of monarchy, and yet another revolution in the 1680s. (In this sense ballad history parallels women’s history in that its chronology does not reflect the chronology of political history.) Nor are there references in the ballads to the variety of efforts undertaken to implement the Elizbethan poor law-the capstone of that national welfare system referred to above, nor to its amended versions.

One must face the problem of the reliability or the representativeness of those ballads which were offered as evidence and illustration in this study. It is important to bring as much light to bear on this question as the current state of the art permits. (A similar problem of representativeness faces the student of astrological almanacs and, in a related but not perfectly equivalent sense, the student of sermons in the pre-industrial era.) First, it is impossible to know the total number of ballad titles published: some were entered in the registers of the Stationers’ Company (1554-1709), most were not. Ballads were not meant to be lasting, definitive texts. Rather, like other forms of Tudor- Stuart “popular culture,” they were commercially produced on flimsy material, cheaply, anonymously, for a half-literate audience, and thus

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subject to all the ravages time wreaks on such material. Contemporary references to their use as a kind of wallpaper are not unknown.

Also regarding the reliability of the source, we should note that ballads which bear directly on the theme of poverty-this study used only this type-constitute only one of several themes found in the ballad 1iteratu1-e.~~ Other themes are love and marriage, crime, political events (1568-72, 1588, 1640, 1660, etc.), historical tales, dramatic current events (flood, fire, murder), religion, satire, moral-cautionary tales, and themes which bear indirectly on the question of poverty-wealth, en- closures, drink, usury, harvests, and so on. This last-mentioned indirect (and scattered) evidence clearly supports the argument in this study regarding changing emphases in the ballad literature. But, the reader may object, why should anyone assume that the several thematic types survived in roughly the same proportions in which they were originally published? The answer is, that while we cannot be sure, it is reasonable to assume that apart from seditious and gross ballads which may have been deliberately destroyed, the “theory of proportional survival” obtains, i.e. “that the ratio of sheets which have been preserved for us approximates in large measure to the ratio of sheets actually produced.”72 Similarly, students of almanacs and sermons can safely assume that although only a fraction of those originally published survive, those which do are not atypical. Bernard Capp believed that enough astrological almanacs are extant to make it possible to assess their place in Tudor-Stuart “popular culture” even though of “the millions of almanacs printed, only a few thousand copies survive.”73 For sermons, we often-though admittedly not always-have access to corroborative evidence in diaries and correspondence. And in recognition of the adequacy of the number which do survive, while arguments and interpretations based on sermon evidence are not infrequently impeached by felIow historians, seldom is their representativeness questioned. Thus, i t is not too much to say that if a larger number of ballads (or almanacs or sermons) were available, that larger number would add only nuance and subtlety to the picture one can paint with extant evidence.

71Tudor-Stuart ballads survive mainly in the great collections of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, now principally in the British Library. They include the Bagford, Roxburghe, Luttrell, Percy, Heber, Huth, Child, Christie-Miller. Society of Antiquaries, Chappell, Rollins, and Shirburn collections and, in manuscript form in the British Library the Harleian, Additional, and Sloane MSS.

72William Coupe, The German Illustrated Broadsheet in the Seuvateenth Century. (Baden-Baden, 1966), 1: 83.

l3Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500-1800 (London, 1979), 66.

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Given the adequacy of the number which do survive, the historian should use ballads as corroborative evidence while bearing in mind their unique character. As corroborative evidence, ballads support and amplify several aspects of the history of the poor that have been brought to light by modern historical scholarship, especially that scholarship which has focused on attitudes toward the poor. One finds in them recurrent references to the attenuated condition of the tacit contract between the elite and the poor; to the advent of an aggressive private conception of wealth, with its adverse implications for poor relief; and to the continuing reality of swarms of deceptive, bawling, physically horrific, cheeky beggars in the streets, in the roads, and at church and coach doors. One also finds in them reflections of that steady effort from the 1620s to transform the able-bodied (both honest and vagrant) poor into a disciplined and wage-driven working class. But ballads are not state papers. They stand as a special kind of evidence. On the poor, they convey popular, moralistic, even entertaining impressions of poverty. Those impressions range from nostalgia for a more charitable society to simple family poverty to counterfeit beggars to indirect indictments of the rich to proud beggars to work lessons for the poor. Ballads on poverty do not provide factual, objective analyses, nor do they provide case studies. One finds no shrewd assessments of the causes of poverty, nor does one find statistical treatments of the incidence of poverty. They are literary-imaginative responses to one significant feature of the contemporary social landscape. They tend to the dramatic, the romantic, the sentimental, and the stereotypical. They are careless of chronology. Yet, they should not continue to be neglected as sources. Ballads can be as useful to the historian as parish relief records, central government records, and ~ommentary.7~ Only by using the broad range of evidence, including ballads, can we hope to learn more of both the poor themselves and the attitudes toward them which so powerfully shaped their lives.

74For two recent studies of popular culture which use non-traditional sources, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971).

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English Pre - Industrial Ballads on Poverty, 1500–1700

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