Verse 15. Dun was the name of the Hangman at this time, frequently mentioned in the Rump ballads. Jack Ketch was his successor: Gregory had been Hangman in 1652.
Pages 134, 376. I’ll go no more to the Old Exchange.
The first Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas Gresham’s Bourse, was opened by Queen Elizabeth, January 23rd, 1570, and destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The second was commenced on May 6th, 1667, and burnt on January 10th, 1838. The present building, the third, was opened by Queen Victoria Oct., 28th, 1844. The “Old Exchange,” often referred to in ballads, was Gresham’s. But the “New Exchange” was one, erected where the stables of Durham House in the Strand had stood: opened April 11th, 1609, and removed in 1737. King James I. had named it “Britain’s Bourse.” Built on the model of the established Royal Exchange, it had “cellars, a walk, and a row of shops, filled with milliners, seamstresses, and those of similar occupations; and was a place of fashionable resort. What, however, was intended to rival the Royal Exchange, dwindled into frivolity and ruin, and the site is at present [1829] occupied by a range of handsome houses facing the Strand” (T. Allen’s Hist. and Antiq. of London, iv. 254). In the ballad it is sung of as “Haberdashers’ Hall.” Cp. Roxb. Coll., ii., 230.
Pages 152, 378. There is a certain, &c.
This is an imperfect version of “A Woman’s Birth,” merely the beginning, four stanzas. The whole fifteen (eleven following ours) are reprinted by Wm. Chappell, in the Ballad Society’s Roxburghe Bds., iii. 94, 1875, from a broadside in Roxb. Coll., i. 466, originally printed for Francis Grove [1620-55]. 2nd verse reads:—Her husband Hymen; 4th. Wandring eye; insatiate. The gifts of Juno, Flora, and Diana follow; with woman’s employment of them.
Page 172. Blind Fortune, if thou, &c.
We find this in MS. Harleian, No. 6396, fol. 13. Also two printed copies, in Parnassus Biceps, 1656, 124; and in Sportive Wit, same year, p. 39. We gained the corrections, which we inserted as marginalia, from the MS.; “Ceres in hir Garland” having been corrupted into “Cealus in his.” “Aglaura,” Sir John Suckling’s play, (printed originally in 4to. 1639, with a broad margin of blank, on which the wits made merry with epigrammes, “By this wide margent,” &c.), appeared on April 18th, 1638, and is here referred to. Probably the date of the poem is nearly as early. On p. 175 the “Pilgrimage up Holborn Hill” refers to a journey from Newgate to Tyburn. (See p. 365).
Pages 180, 379. Heard you not lately of a man.
The Mad-Man’s Morrice; written by Humfrey Crouch: For the second part of the broad-sheet version we must refer readers to vol. ii. page 153, of the Ballad Society’s reprint of the Roxburghe Ballads (now happily arrived at completion of the first massive folio vol. of Major Pearson’s original pair; the bulky third and slim fourth vols. being afterwards added). We promised to give it, and gladly would have done so, if we had space: for it is a trustworthy picture of a Bedlamite’s sufferings, under the harsh treatment of former days. Date about 1635-42.
To our enumeration of mad songs (Westm. Droll. App. p. 9) we may add Thomas Jordan’s “I am the woefullest madman.”