SOURCE: Introduction to Cheap Print and Popular Piety, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 1-8.

[In the following excerpt, Watt rejects critical studies that portray the broadside ballad as appealing only to lower-class sensibilities, and argues that the ballads also made their way into “respected” culture as they served important social and cultural needs.]

My decision to begin research in early modern English history was inspired by studies published over the past fifteen years which are loosely described as works on ‘popular culture’.¹ Margaret Spufford's work on the late seventeenth-century chapbook trade, in particular, raised a challenging set of questions.² How far back could this trade be traced? When did publishers begin to produce and distribute reading material consciously aimed at the humblest members of the literate public? The criterion of ‘cheapness’ seemed the best place to start, since price was the major constraining factor in book buying, after literacy. In this period up to 75٪ of the cost came from the paper, so the shortest works were the cheapest works: the one-page broadside and the tiny octavo chapbook.³ This ‘cheap’ print, once identified, would provide an insight into popular culture and popular religion.

To some extent, these expectations were satisfied. There was, indeed, an increasing degree of specialization at the bottom end of the publishing trade in the decades before 1640, reaching, it would appear, a rapidly widening market. However, it would be misleading to describe this as a ‘popular’ printed culture, if ‘popular’ is taken to imply something exclusive to a specific social group. Ballads were hawked in the alehouses and markets, but in the same period they were sung by minstrels in the households of the nobility and gentry, who copied them carefully into manuscripts. Pictorial themes which appeared in the crudest woodcuts were also painted on the walls of manor houses. Chapbooks which sold for twopence, and appealed to ‘honest folks that have no lands’, were also bought by a Staffordshire lady and carefully left in her will to her clergyman son.⁴ In the process of research, ‘cultural homogeneities’ appeared as often as cultural divisions.⁵

The model of a binary opposition of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ has already been criticized, modified and sometimes disowned by recent social historians. Tim Harris points out that the two-tiered model fails to match the reality of a multi-tiered social hierarchy, with substantial numbers of households in the ‘middling’ levels. He argues that ‘vertical antagonisms’, especially the divisions caused by religion, were as important as horizontal divisions in seventeenth-century London.⁶ Martin Ingram emphasizes the converse argument, describing areas of cultural ‘consensus’ which united those at all social levels.⁷ While these critics doubt the explanatory value of the model, Roger Chartier attacks the theoretical premise which underlies it: the assumption ‘that it is possible to establish exclusive relationships between specific cultural forms and particular social groups’. This assumption has led historians to pre-define certain cultural cleavages, which they have then proceeded to describe.⁸

Should we completely abandon the concept of ‘popular culture’, or can we find a more constructive way of using it? Peter Burke's ‘asymmetrical’ definition provides a start: for him, the ‘great’ tradition was the closed culture of the educated elites, while the ‘little’ (or popular) tradition was open to everyone, including those elites.⁹ This inclusive definition is helpful, but, as Bob Scribner points out, the language tends to reduce the ‘little’ tradition to a ‘residual or marginalized category’. Scribner suggests that we must think of popular culture as a ‘total, unified culture’: a system of shared attitudes and values, and the performances or artefacts in which they are embodied.¹⁰ We cannot ignore the existence of social stratification, nor of subcultural identities (such as apprentices or vagrants), but we must see how these overlapping segments somehow made up a functional whole.¹¹

Scribner's concept of culture is harder to grasp and to use than the model of simple binary opposition, but it is more faithful to the complexities of past societies. In the present study, I will try to explore what we may describe as ‘shared values’, ‘widespread attitudes’ or ‘commonplace mentalities’: not a homogeneous, articulated set of doctrines, but a mosaic made up of changing and often contradictory fragments.

We may choose to call this mosaic ‘popular’ belief, but only if the term is understood inclusively. As historians used to the ‘almost tyrannical preeminence of the social dimension’¹² we may be uncomfortable with the lack of evidence to pinpoint the audience for cheap print, and to locate it precisely on the social scale. We may be frustrated with the inability of the printed artefacts to help us differentiate between the views of the gentry, the ‘middling sort’ and the labouring poor. But this idea that the broadsides and chapbooks were aimed at and consumed by a definable social group may be a myth. The audience presupposed within the cheap print itself appears to be inclusive rather than exclusive, addressed both as ‘readers’ and as ‘hearers’; as substantial householders expected to employ labourers, and as couples ‘whose whole stocke could hardly purchase a wedding ring’.¹³ Of course, this cheap print is not homogeneous: some items like the copper engravings and plague broadsides appear to have been produced for a market of middling Londoners, while other ballads and chapbooks inhabit the world of poor Northumberland men, west-country lasses, serving-men, chambermaids and ‘poor and plaine people’ living in ‘remote’ parts of the country.¹⁴ As literacy increased, the market for cheap print expanded, and there may sometimes have been gaps between authorial intention and audience consumption. But the buyers remained socially variegated: in the early seventeenth century gentry collectors were still copying ballads into their commonplace books; probably the same ballads which were to be found on the walls of ‘honest alehouses’, in ‘the shops of artificers’ and in ‘the cottages of poor husbandmen’.¹⁵

Admittedly, no matter how we define ‘popular belief’, it is impossible for the historian to get ‘directly at’ this mosaic of values and attitudes. Bob Scribner is particularly sceptical about the source materials used in studies of popular culture (including printed broadsides and chapbooks), arguing that they reveal only ‘forms of downward mediation by educational or literate elites’.¹⁶ The present study is more positive about the value of looking at printed wares, provided they are set in their cultural context. In our approach to printed sources, Roger Chartier's notion of cultural ‘consumption’ may be useful. For Chartier ‘consumption’ should be taken as ‘a form of production which, to be sure, manufactures no object, but which constitutes representations that are never identical to those that the producers (the authors or artists) have introduced into their works’.¹⁷ Although we cannot recover the reaction of the individual buyer, we will be looking at how the collective responses of cheap-print ‘consumers’ exercised an influence on what was printed, and especially what was reprinted. For example, in chapter 3 we will look at a body of long-enduring ballads which was to some extent ‘produced’ by the consumers through the process of selection. This examination will suggest ways in which the propaganda of Protestant reformers was modified by the more conservative religious outlook of the larger public.

There are undoubtedly certain sources which can bring us closer to ordinary people as cultural ‘creators’ rather than as creative ‘consumers’.¹⁸ Historians are paying increasing attention to records of slanderous rhymes, skimmingtons and other ritualized protests or festivities which show people using established symbols in a resourceful way.¹⁹ However, the ballads, woodcuts and chapbooks provide a window on a particular element in the ‘process of culture formation’:²⁰ the role of print. This is an important issue in an era of increasing literacy, and in a country whose religion placed so much emphasis on words and reading. The past decades have seen a number of influential studies on the impact of print in the early modern period.²¹ But we still need more careful investigation of the ways in which print interacted with other forms of communication in the specific cultural context of post-Reformation England.

Clearly not all printed sources are equally good as windows on the process by which cultural values were disseminated and absorbed (or modified) by the wider society. The notion of ‘cheap print’ is a valid one, if used as a neutral category, not as a genre aimed exclusively at a definable social group. Although we should try to avoid assumptions about the readership, we must also take account of the basic social and economic realities which limited contact with printed texts for much of the populace. These realities included the cost of a work, its geographical distribution, and the level of reading skills which it presupposed. During our period, publishers themselves were increasingly adopting strategies to match these realities: by organizing a syndicate for the distribution of ballads, by using woodcut pictures to appeal to those on the fringes of literacy, by condensing longer stories into an inexpensive 24-page octavo format.²²

The growing specialization of publishers in printed works targeted for humble readers could be seen as an agent of ‘polarization’; of a growing gap between patrician and plebeian culture, as described by Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson.²³ Yet, if the culmination of this process was the creation of a separated body of ‘chap’ literature for an identifiably ‘plebeian’ audience, this did not occur within the period under study here, and possibly not until the eighteenth century. Before 1640, it is likely that a large proportion of the buyers were drawn from the middling ranks of yeomen, husbandmen and tradespeople, and that even gentry readers were not uncommon.²⁴ If publishers did increasingly ‘target’ humbler readers, this should not necessarily be seen as a divisive phenomenon. Cheap print in this period was just as likely to be an instrument of social cohesion, as more people were brought into the reading public, and as stories, images and values permeated the multiple tiers of English society.

This ‘shared culture’ was disseminated along lines of communication which connected the country, both socially and geographically. The distribution of cheap print relied especially on a network of wayfarers: minstrels, broadside ballad sellers, interlude players, petty chapmen. Texts and their effects radiated outward to local communities from certain focal points: the marketplace, the parish church, the godly household, the inn or alehouse.²⁵

The cultural historian Roger Chartier, while attacking the elite-popular divide, has set up a new dichotomy which seems equally rigid: that of city versus country. In the cities, print was ‘everywhere present, posted, exhibited, cried in the streets, and highly visible’; but in the seventeenth century this ‘familiarity that was the beginning of literacy’ was almost exclusively the privilege of urban dwellers.²⁶ This may well be true of France, but in England there can be no doubt that texts of one kind or another were familiar in all parts of the realm. From the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, injunctions required that the Lord's Prayer and other biblical sentences be painted in every parish church, and this order was reinforced by visitations.²⁷ In a Protestant country there was greater incentive to encourage literacy, and most parishioners had some contact with bibles, catechisms, prayer books or psalters, which were read aloud in church, and probably handled, if not actually owned.²⁸ Broadside ballads were commonplace from deepest Cambridgeshire to Lancashire, to the western counties; and literature of the period most typically depicts the ballad seller in a rural setting. Although early Elizabethan ballads were sometimes billed as ‘A warning to London’ or addressed to ‘London dames’, by the second quarter of the seventeenth century they were much more commonly given titles like ‘The cooper of Norfolke’ or ‘A pleasant new northerne song, called the two York-shire lovers’.²⁹

Some of these stories and their tunes may well have been picked up in the alehouses of Norfolk and Yorkshire by the same pedlars and travelling performers who later disseminated the printed ballads.³⁰ Even when they were concocted in London by an anonymous hack, these printed wares were not finished products like gloves or combs, to be used in much the same way by each purchaser. If we are to choose a metaphor from the chapman's pack, print was more like the ‘scotch cloth’ or ‘coarse linen’, sold by the yard, to be made into something by the buyer.³¹ In the parlance of the new cultural history, we should not look at print in isolation, but at how it was ‘appropriated’.³² Much of this study will focus on the singlesheet broadside, chosen at first because, at a penny or less, it was the cheapest form of print. Yet the broadside was not only a text to be read. It was also, in fact primarily, a song to be sung, or an image to be pasted on the wall. In these oral and visual forms, it had the potential to reach a much wider audience than its original buyers and its ‘literate’ readers.

The question of literacy is, of course, central to any study of print in this period. We know that by the 1640s roughly 30٪ of adult males in rural England could sign their names, with up to 78٪ fully ‘literate’ in London.³³ David Cressy's evidence shows how the ability to sign one's name was closely tied to social status, with marked differences across geographical regions. In 1600, 52٪ of East Anglian tradesmen and craftsmen could sign, compared with 80٪ in London. East Anglian yeomen and husbandmen were 61٪ and 21٪ ‘literate’, while in Durham and Northumberland the figures were much lower, at 23٪ and 13٪ respectively. Statistics for labourers are thin on the ground, but in the diocese of Norwich over the entire period 1580-1700, 15٪ could sign their names. This was a little better than the women, whose showing was only 11٪.³⁴

However, as Margaret Spufford has convincingly argued, these statistics are probably gross underestimates of reading ability.³⁵ Reading was taught before writing, and it is likely that many more rural people could get through the text of a broadside ballad than could sign their names to a Protestation Oath. In Sweden, a tradition of teaching reading alone, without writing, survived well into the nineteenth century, and the gap between these skills is verified in church examination registers.³⁶ Cressy's figures for early modern England may only represent the proportion of each group which remained in school from age seven to eight when writing was taught. Amongst husbandmen and labourers especially, there may be a large number who attended school up to the age of six, and learnt the primary skill of reading, but who were whisked away to join the labour force ‘as soon as they were strong enough to contribute meaningfully to the family economy’.³⁷ The ‘literacy’ statistics should be taken as minimum figures, not as certainties.

Nevertheless, in a partially literate society, the most influential media were those which combined print with non-literate forms. Recent studies on the impact of the printing press have viewed the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a period in which oral and literate modes of communication were closely intertwined.³⁸ Printed works were disseminated by word of mouth, transforming the culture of the ‘illiterate’, and oral modes of communication shaped the structure of printed works. The interesting process was not only the spread of literacy and readership, but the complex interweaving of the printed word with existing cultural practices. In Part I, we will look at how the broadside ballad interacted with oral and musical traditions. In Part II, we will see the broadside picture against the visual background of domestic wall painting and painted cloth. Only in Part III will we follow the development of ‘cheap print’ intended primarily for reading; first surveying a variety of short pamphlets, and then charting the beginnings of the ‘penny chapbook’ as a specialized product.

The dissemination of Protestant ideas will be used as a focus for this investigation. However, to describe these ballads, woodcuts and chapbooks as thoroughly ‘Protestant’ would be to overlook the way they blended the new ideas with older attitudes to religion and morality, just as they embraced existing oral and visual traditions. Protestant concepts and images were, like printed texts, the raw material which the purchaser could choose and shape as he wanted, according to his own needs and beliefs. We can only approach the buyer's perspective indirectly, by comparing the initial polemic of Protestant reformers with the religious ballads and chapbooks which found long-lasting commercial success.

There is little in this cheap godly print (and therefore in this study) about double predestination, ecclesiastical vestments, the position of the altar, or the prerequisites for communion. We should not assume that the audience had no interest in these matters, but that, when they did, it was satisfied elsewhere; in black-letter sermons and treatises, or discussions with neighbours, or catechizing sessions. The printed works in this study operated largely outside the sphere of the church. They were bought for entertainment, or to satisfy needs which the reader might not necessarily have defined as ‘religious’: the need for role models, for inspirational stories, for behavioural rules to give to their children, for guidance on the approach to death. As the cheap print trade developed and became more specialized, it seems to have become increasingly responsive to these needs, and therefore of particular interest to the ‘social and cultural’ historian, as well as to the historian of ‘religion’.

Notes

1. For example, Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular recreations in English society 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973); Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic (1971); Natalie Zemon-Davis, Society and culture in early modern France (Stanford, 1982 edn); Robert Scribner, For the sake of simple folk (Cambridge, 1981). Not all of these historians have used the term ‘popular culture’ themselves.

2. Margaret Spufford, Small books and pleasant histories. Popular fiction and its readership in seventeenth-century England (1981).

3. Philip Gaskell, A new introduction to bibliography (Oxford, 1972), p. 177.

4. See chs. 1, 5, 8.

5. Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’, Past and Present, 105 (Nov. 1984), p. 113.

6. Tim Harris, ‘The problem of “popular political culture” in seventeenth-century London’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), pp. 43-58.

7. Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture”’, pp. 79, 112-13; Martin Ingram, Church courts, sex and marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 167.

8. Roger Chartier, The cultural uses of print in early modern France, trans. Lydia C. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987), p. 3; Roger Chartier, Cultural history. Between practices and representations, trans. Lydia C. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1988), p. 30.

9. Peter Burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe (1978), p. 28.

10. Bob Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), pp. 181-2. The definition is that used by A.L. Kroeber to define ‘culture’ as a whole.

11. Ibid., pp. 183-4.

12. Chartier, Cultural history, p. 30.

13. John Andrewes, The converted mans new birth: describing the direct way to heaven (1629), sig.A2. ‘A most excellent new dittie, wherein is shewed the sage sayings, and wise sentences of Salomon’ (1586). Cupids schoole: wherein, yongmen and maids may learne divers sorts of complements (1632), sig.C3. See pp. 311, 100, 295.

14. Engravings and broadsides discussed in ch. 6. Martin Parker, The king and a poore northerne man (1633). ‘The crafty lass of the west’, Pepys, IV, 7. Cupids schoole. Richard Hawes, The poore-mans plaster-box (1634). See pp. 299, 294-5.

15. B M Addit. MS 15,225; Shirburn. Izaak Walton, The complete angler; or, the contemplative man's recreation (1653), facs. edn (1976), p. 49. Nicholas Bownde, The doctrine of the sabbath (1595), p. 242.

16. Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, p. 177.

17. Chartier, Cultural history, p. 40.

18. Bob Scribner criticizes Chartier's theory of ‘consumption’ for its failure to show ordinary people as creators. Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, p. 184.

19. For example, Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture”’, pp. 79-113; Buchanan Sharp, ‘Popular political opinion in England 1660-1685’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), pp. 13-29; David Underdown, Revel, riot and rebellion. Popular politics and culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985).

20. Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, p. 184.

21. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change (2 vols. in 1, Cambridge, 1980 edn). Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy (Toronto, 1962). Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, romance and technology (1971); Walter J. Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word (1982).

22. See chs. 3, 4, 7.

23. A.J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, ‘A polarised society?’, in Fletcher and Stevenson, eds., Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-15.

24. See Frances Wolfreston, pp. 315-17.

25. See chs. 1, 5.

26. Chartier, The cultural uses of print, pp. 347, 158-9, 166, 176.

27. See pp. 217-18.

28. On the importance of the Book of Common Prayer as a unifying force and an encouragement to literacy, see John N. Wall jnr, ‘The Reformation in England and the typographical revolution: “By this printing … the doctrine of the Gospel soundeth to all nations”’, in Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia Wagonheim, eds., Print and culture in the Renaissance: essays on the advent of printing in Europe (1986).

29. ‘A warning to London by the fall of Antwerp’ [1577?], Collmann no. 69. ‘A proper new balade expressyng the fames, concerning a warning to al London dames’ [1571], Collmann no. 71. ‘The cooper of Norfolke’ [c. 1627], Pepys, I, 400. ‘A pleasant new northerne song’ [c. 1630], Pepys, I, 240.

30. John Taylor collected anecdotes from victualling houses for his Wit and mirth. Chargeably collected out of tavernes, ordinaries, innes … (1626).

31. On the contents of the pedlar's pack, see Margaret Spufford, The great reclothing of rural England: petty chapmen and their wares in the seventeenth century (1984).

32. Chartier, The cultural uses of print, p. 6.

33. David Cressy, Literacy and the social order. Reading and writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 72.

34. Ibid., pp. 146, 150, 152, 119.

35. Margaret Spufford, ‘First steps in literacy: the reading and writing experiences of the humblest seventeenth-century autobiographers’, Social History, 4 (1979), pp. 407-35. See also Keith Thomas, ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’, in Gerd Baumann, ed., The written word. Literacy in transition (Oxford, 1986), p. 103.

36. Egil Johansson, ‘The history of literacy in Sweden’, in Harvey J. Graff, ed., Literacy and social development in the West: a reader (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 181-2.

37. Spufford, Small books, p. 26.

38. Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, p. 129. Roger Chartier, ‘Culture as appropriation: popular cultural uses in early modern France’, in Stephen L. Kaplan ed., Understanding popular culture: Europe from the middle ages to the nineteenth century (Berlin, 1984), pp. 229-53. Ong, Rhetoric, romance and technology, pp. 23-47; Ong, Orality and literacy. Tyson and Wagonheim, eds., Print and culture in the Renaissance.

Abbreviations

Arber: Edward Arber, ed., A transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 (5 vols., 1875-94).

BL: British Library.

BM Prints: Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

BM Satires: Collection of prints in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. All pre-1640 prints described in Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum. Division 1. Satires. Vol. 1. 1320-1689, ed. Frederic G. Stephens (1870).

Child: F. J. Child, The English and Scottish popular ballads (5 vols., 1882-98).

Collmann: H. L. Collmann, ed., Ballads and broadsides chiefly of the Elizabethan period … now in the library at Britwell Court (1912). Collection now in the Huntington Library, California.

Crawford: Collection of ballads and broadsides owned by the Earl of Crawford, on deposit at the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Listed in Bibliotheca Lindesiana: catalogue of a collection of English ballads of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (1890; facs. edn, 1962).

Dicey catalogue 1754: William and Cluer Dicey, A catalogue of maps, histories, prints, old ballads, copy-books, broadsheets and other patters, drawing-books, garlands &c. (1754). Reprinted in R. S. Thomson, ‘The development of the broadside ballad trade and its influence upon the transmission of English folksongs’ (Cambridge PhD, 1974), App. C.

DNB: The Dictionary of National Biography.

Douce: Francis Douce collection of ballads in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

ent.: Entry in Stationers' Register.

Euing: Collection of ballads in Glasgow University Library. Reprinted in John Holloway, ed., The Euing collection of English broadside ballads (Glasgow, 1971).

Eyre: G. E. B. Eyre, ed., A transcript of the registers of the worshipful Company of Stationers 1640-1708 (3 vols., 1913-14).

Hind: Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (3 vols., vol. III compiled by M. Corbett and M. Norton, Cambridge, 1952-64).

Huth. 50: Collection of ballads in the British Library. Reprinted by Joseph Lilly, 1867.

Lilly: Joseph Lilly, ed., A collection of 79 black-letter ballads and broadsides printed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1867). Now in the British Library, Huth. 50.

Manchester: Manchester Central Library, collection of ballads, 2 vols.

MS Ashmole 48: Manuscript volume of ballads in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Reprinted in Wright. ed., Songs and ballads, with other short poems, chiefly of the reign of Philip and Mary (1860).

Norris and Brown 1712: List of stock ballads and chapbooks registered on 20 September 1712 to Thomas Norris and Charles Brown. Reprinted in Thomson, ‘Development of the broadside ballad trade’, App. B.

‘partners’: The ‘ballad partners’ syndicate (with changing membership) for the publication and distribution of ballads throughout much of the seventeenth century.

Pepys: Ballad collection of Samuel Pepys, Magdalene College, Cambridge, 5 vols.

PRO: Public Record Office.

Rawlinson 566: Rawlinson Collection of ballads in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

RB orig.: Roxburghe collection of ballads in the British Library, 3 vols. Virtually all pre-1640 items have been reprinted in ‘RB repr.’.

RB repr.: William Chappell and J. Woodfall Ebsworth, eds., The Roxburghe Ballads (8 vols., 1871-97).

RCHM: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.

REED: Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, 1979-).

Rollins Index: Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries in the Stationers' Registers: 1557-1709 (1924; 2nd edn with intro. by Leslie Shepard, Hatboro, 1967).

SA: Collection of Broadsides in the Society of Antiquaries, London. Catalogue by Robert Lemon, 1866.

Seng: Peter Joseph Seng, ed. Tudor songs and ballads. From MS Cotton Vespasian A-25 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

Shirburn: Andrew Clark, ed., The Shirburn ballads (Oxford, 1907). From a MS in the library of Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire.

Simpson: Claude M. Simpson, The British broadside ballad and its music (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1966).

STC: A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English books printed abroad 1475-1640 (first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave; 2nd edn, revised and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katherine F. Pantzer, 2 vols., 1976-86).

Wing: Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British North America and of English books printed in other countries 1641-1700 (compiled by Donald Wing, vol. III, New York, 1951; 2nd edn, revised and enlarged by the Index Committee of the Modern Language Association of America, vols. I-II, New York, 1972-82).

Wood: Anthony Wood's collection of ballads in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Wright: Thomas Wright, ed., Songs and ballads, with other short poems, chiefly of the reign of Philip and Mary (1860).