[In the following excerpt, Thompson argues that Samuel Pepys's collection of seventeenth-century ballads and chapbooks are invaluable aids to understanding the lives and tastes of ordinary English people of the period.]

Two months before he died in 1703, Samuel Pepys made his will. Being childless, he left his treasured library of three thousand volumes to his nephew John Jackson, with the stipulation that on Jackson's death the books should go either to his old college, Magdalene, or to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1724, therefore, the Bibliotheca Pepysiana came to Magdalene, to be housed in their glass-fronted cases in the finely proportioned first-floor room of the recent building to which Pepys himself had generously contributed.

Among the meticulously arranged and catalogued books, mostly bound in calf and sheepskin leather, are three squat volumes, which Pepys entitled Penny Merriments. Beside them is a similar volume of Penny Godlinesses. The Merriments contain 115 small books, later known as chapbooks. The pages usually measure only 8.5 × 14 cm—a few are even smaller—and books in the first two volumes are sixteen or twenty-four pages long, that is, printed from a single sheet. The third volume contains longer ‘histories’ and ‘romances’. The majority of the chapbooks are printed in black-letter type on very cheap paper, and many are illustrated with crude woodcuts. …

These merriments are a vivid and invaluable source of popular culture for historians: a rare window on the minds of ordinary people. Such chapbooks formed a part of that ephemeral ‘street literature’ of the seventeenth century along with ballads, broadsides, almanacks, political propaganda and news-sheets. They cost a penny, or at most twopence, and were so cheaply and shoddily produced that very few have survived. The more popular titles were printed over and over again, possibly from the same typesetting; certainly the blocks for the crude woodcuts were re-used—sometimes with little or no reference to the text. The poor quality of the printing and the number of typographical errors suggest that this task was relegated to prentice work. How large editions were is not known, but it is probable that it was a good deal higher than the normal 1,500 copies for more respectable literature. In 1683 it was said that 20,000 copies of William Russell's speech from the scaffold were run off as a broadside. This example of street literature may be a better guide.¹

Pepys was an inveterate collector. And he had the three personal attributes of a collector: insatiable curiosity, wealth, and a strongly developed acquisitive urge. He gathered books for his library with care and discrimination for over forty years. His collection of ballads is the finest in the world. He also accumulated manuscripts, prints, maps, plans, frontispieces and music. Why he bothered with popular ephemera he never tells us. It could be that as the son of a poor tailor he felt an urge to keep in touch with his humble roots. Or he may like other contemporaries, Thomason, Rawlinson, Luttrell, Wood, for instance, have had the conscious intention of preserving examples of his own culture for later generations. Like John Selden, whose collection of ballads he acquired, he may have felt that ‘Though some make slight of Libells; yet you may see by them how the wind sits. … More solid Things do not show the complexion of the Times so well as Ballads and Libells.’ Their ‘simplicity and nakedness of style’ probably appealed to him, as it did to other bibliophiles. Or, again, he may have felt an urge similar to Boswell's in 1763, to gain ‘a great acquaintance with the humours and traditions of the English common people’. The market for ballads was declining in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and the broadsheets were being replaced by chapbooks. The Penny Merriments may therefore be a reflection of this change in popular taste.

The chapbooks which are, or can be, dated suggest that Pepys was an active collector in the decade of the 1680s, when he rose to the height of his influence as a naval administrator, and then fell after the Glorious Revolution. At this time the lucrative ballad and chapbook market was dominated by two groups of publishers, who jealously guarded their copyrights registered with the Stationers' Company. The Coles-Vere-Wright-Clarke-Thackeray-Passinger-Millet partnership traced its origins back to the 1620s, and specialised in old popular favourites in black-letter type. The other group, including Brooksby, Deacon, Dennisson, Back, Blare, Conyers and Kell, seems to have been less tightly organised, and to have ventured on some more topical material. The two centres of the London chapbook trade were around Pye Corner—the ballad warehouse—and London Bridge. Londoners bought their pennyworths from booksellers' stalls or from hawkers; provincial readers relied on travelling chapmen, who set out like Autolycus in the spring, or booths at country fairs. The publishers of chapbooks were not fly-by-night pedlars, but usually substantial citizens, freemen of the Stationers' Company, and on occasion its masters or wardens.²

What was the readership that these experienced and successful stationers aimed at? Though research on seventeenth-century literacy in England is incomplete, there seems little doubt that the ability at least to read was spreading widely down the classes. The enormous expansion of publishing would support this view, and remarks in prefaces of popular books corroborate it.³ It seems improbable that the poorest classes, cottagers, day-labourers—the frequent butt of chapbook humour—or unskilled workers in the towns would have the time, ability or motivation to read chapbooks. Women—another popular quarry—were similarly probably less literate than men. The most likely audience is the middle classes: the lower echelons, tradesmen, artisans, journeymen, yeomen and substantial husbandmen, for simpler jests, histories, romances and rogueries, the better educated for the subtler humour, the garlands, the satire and the complements. The themes of such tales as Jack of Newbery, Dick Whittington or Aurelius would certainly appeal to the aspiring lower-middle classes, who would likewise identify with many of the characters in other stories. The prevailing tone of merriness and uncorsetted ribaldry is again essentially that of the non-puritan bourgeoisie. A typical ‘pill to purge melancholy’ is ‘Chaucer Junior's’ Canterbury Tales. This ‘Choice Banquet of delightful Tales’ is dedicated to ‘The Bakers, Smiths, Millers and other Readers’. Occasionally one finds a literary reference to chapbook readers; for instance, in Alexander Oldys's sophisticated The Fair Extravagant the hero wishes to write a note from a country inn, and calls for pen and paper. The hostess's paper is ‘torn from The Practice of Piety or The Famous History of Valentine and Orson’.⁴

There is not space in this brief introduction to discuss the fascinating and complex question of the sources of these chapbook stories and jests. Many of the indigenous English myths and stories may well have been handed down orally, in their verse form, before they were first printed in the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Other rich treasuries which were pilfered shamelessly by English hack writers were Italian facetiae and novelle, French fabliaux and Spanish and German rogue stories. Many of these, in turn, can be traced even farther back to Arabic origins.⁵ Suffice it to say here that very few, if any, of the plots, situations, puns or jests are original to the editions selected here.

Most of the chapbooks were written anonymously. Writers were paid only about £2 for their work, and most of them were probably exploited denizens of Grub Street. Occasionally a popular author is cited, no doubt to boost sales. Thus we have Martin Parker and Lawrence Price, two of the most prolific and successful ballad writers of the early seventeenth century, and Thomas Deloney and Richard Johnson, equally famous as romanciers. Crompton, Crouch, Lanfier and Smithson were also well known to seventeenth-century readers of street literature. William Lilly and Richard Saunders were household words as astrologers and almanac writers. For the rest of the anonymous hacks, survival rather than fame was no doubt their prime consideration.⁶ …

Hyder Rollins once wrote that after the Diary, Pepys' collection of broadside ballads was ‘perhaps the greatest treasure in his library’. For the social historian, there is much justice in this apparently perverse relegation of fine and rare editions, important manuscripts and prints to scruffy ephemera of the streets. The great paradox of historical research is that we know most about the few at the peak of the social pyramid, least about the many. Intensive work on parish, county and legal records in recent years has produced many invaluable additions and revisions to our conceptions of ‘the inarticulate’ in pre-industrial England, but the very nature of the evidence used tends to preclude answers to important questions like ‘What made ordinary people laugh?’ ‘What were their everyday worries?’ ‘What were their fantasies?’ ‘What were their popular prejudices?’ ‘What were their ambitions?’ ‘How did they organise their day-to-day lives?’ ‘How did they spend their leisure time? ‘What were their ideals?’

Obviously literary evidence of any sort must be handled with great circumspection by historical researchers. Anyone who assumed that Restoration comedy accurately and completely reflected the life and thought of the upper classes in later Stuart England would receive a nasty shock if transported back three hundred years. Nonetheless, the insights into the minds and lives of ordinary people which judicious reading of the Penny Merriments affords, places them alongside the five volumes of ballads as veritable treasures of the Pepysian Library.

Notes

1. On this genre, see Leslie Shepard, History of Street Literature (1973); on printing, D. F. Mckenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’, Studies in Bibliography, XXII (1969), 1-76.

2. This paragraph paraphrases the brilliant bibliographical research of Cyprian Blagden: ‘Notes on the Ballad Market in the second half of the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in Bibliography, VI (1954) 161-180. A chapman is portrayed in Sec. III, A Country Garland.

3. Roger Schofield, ‘Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial England’ in Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968) pp. 311-325; H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1600-1640 (Cambridge, 1970) pp. 84-85, 180-181.

4. London, 1682; Bunyan's youthful reading of this class of literature is well known.

5. John Wardroper, Jest Upon Jest (London, 1970) pp. 1-25; Gershon Legman, The Horn Book (New Hyde Park, 1964) passim; invaluable reference works are Katharine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of Folk-Tales, 4 vols. (London, 1970-1971), and E. C. Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. See also my source-tracing in the forthcoming Check list in The Library (1976).

6. Bennett, English Books, p. 229.