XXII. THE BALLAD SHEET
AND SONG GARLAND
When the folk-song singer did not get his song by oral transmission he took it from a ballad sheet, or from those small collections of songs which, for at least three centuries, were called “Garlands.” The words of most of our folk-songs were generally printed either on the ballad sheet (otherwise “broadside”), or included among those that formed the contents of the “Garland,” and nowhere else, except in the rarest instances. Regular song books were too dignified to admit songs or ballads of the folk-song class. As a consequence the folk-songs that survive in an early printed form are chiefly found on broadsides.
Technically, the broadside is a printed piece of paper (the size is immaterial) meant to be read unfolded. A tradesman’s hand-bill, for example, is a broadside. Folded, the broadside becomes folio, quarto, or octavo. The “garlands” were small folded booklets of either eight or sixteen pages, and contained ten or twelve songs, the outer page being generally decorated with a woodcut, and having a list of the songs contained within.
The reason why the broadside ballad was printed on one side only appears to be this—It was the practice to paste them on cottage walls, inside cupboard doors, chest lids, and such like places. There are many references in literature to this method of displaying the ballad, as for example—
“I will now lead you to an honest ale-house where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the window, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.”—Walton’s Compleat Angler, 1653.
No wonder that the old angler and his pupil found so many delightful snatches of quaint old song current where ballads and songs were so fostered. The Spectator shows that the usage had not died out in Queen Anne’s reign—
“I cannot for my heart leave a room before I have thoroughly studied the walls of it, and examined the several printed papers which are usually pasted upon them.”—No. 85, vol. ii.
Although the ballad was freely hawked about the streets of towns, and carried into the country by “flying stationers” and pedlars (witness Autolycus in the Winter’s Tale), yet the pastings upon walls and the constant foldings of loose ballad sheets soon destroyed existing copies, for few of the old ballad lovers were like Mr Pepys and Captain Cox. Laneham, it will be remembered, tells in his “Letter,” 1575, describing the festivities at Kenilworth Castle, that Cox’s ballads numbered more than a hundred, and were “all ancient,” and were “fair wrapt in parchment, and tied with a whip cord.” Would there had been more of the Captain’s careful disposition.