The English Bawdy Ballad - Songs of Resistance

Magpie Lane in Oxford, once known as Gropecunt Lane

The penny broadsheet ballad was the gossip mill and the advertising jingle of 17th century England. They reached the peak of  popularity in the mid 17th century, by 1660 around 400,000 broadsheets were sold in England each year. The broadside began in the 16th century, from 1556 the Worshipful Company of Stationers a City of London livery company originally founded in 1406, tried for force all ballads to be registered, an early form of copyrighting which saw only about 2,000 ballads recorded during the next 50 years. Broadside ballads sometimes called 'vulgar ballads' to differentiate them from more respectable 'traditional ballads' covered all sorts of subjects from news stories, scandals, drinking and love songs they were the tabloids of their day.

Broadside ballads were an early expression of the printed word, they are a barometer of the progress of the printing industry changing fonts and methods from the 16th until the 19th century when they finally died out with the arrival of newspapers.

The ballads were originally collected into so called chapbooks (the forerunner of the paperback novel) which reached the height of popularity in England during the 18th century and which according to Wikipedia included many different kinds of ephemera, popular or folk literature (that) were published as chapbooks, such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children's literature and almanacs.

 In many ways chapbooks were the blogs of their day and they were as Wikipedia points out " an important medium for the dissemination of popular culture to the common people, especially in rural areas. They were a medium of entertainment, information and (generally unreliable) history. They are now valued as a record of popular culture, preserving cultural artifacts that may not survive in any other form."

One of the most popular and influential chapbooks was Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom (1596), believed to be the source for the introduction of the character St George into English folk plays. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapbooks

What we are seeing here is a social revolution, in England the male literacy rate in the mid 17th century was around 30 per cent, within a hundred years this had doubled to about 60 per cent by the 1750s. All this was taking place in the context of huge social changes in England at the time including civil war, republicanism, regicide, commonwealth, the restoration of the monarchy, population growth, agrarian reforms, industrialisation, urbanisation and the origins of what was to become the British empire.

In the midst of the socio-political maelstrom that characterises 17th century England the broadside ballad documents these changes for the benefit of the working classes. The broadsheets cost between half a penny and a penny during the period under consideration here, so not only do they reflect growing literacy they also reflect increased disposable wealth that would allow the masses to partake in the production and consumption of culture that was unprecedentedly on their own terms and in great numbers.
The birth of popular culture as opposed to folk culture was a by-product of urbanisation and the widening division between life in rural more traditional locations and the attractions and novelties of urban living encountered by the recently transplanted labouring poor.

The Enraged Musician (1741) William Hogarth
 A ballad seller trying to sell ballads as her baby cries 
and the boy is urinating before the girl’s startled gaze

 
Amongst these new cultural artifacts were the bawdy ballads that were sung outside the doors of brothels and stews in the rapidly expanding towns and cities of late 17th and into the 18th century mostly driven by the enclosure of traditional common lands and the privatisation of agriculture.
If broadside ballads and chapbooks were the early precursors of the blogosphere and the internet, then the bawdy ballads were the pornographic element of social intercourse after the English Restoration.

I am no Royalist (and neither would I have been in the 17th century either)...but the dour miserable puritanism of the Commonwealth era when zealots would hang cats on Monday for killing mice on Sunday was doomed to fail. When the monarchy was restored I think there was a sort of 1960s type social rebellion against the strictures of the over paternalistic and micro managing state, people let their hair down and partied with renewed enthusiasm.

According to the impressive Jack Horntip Collection of folklore in a web based commentary upon the ballad UNDER THE WILLOW SHADE a 17th century drollery he says:- 

"As early as 1655, when the Puritan interregnum still had five years to bind up English merriment, the anti-Puritan underground felt strong enough to publish the first of a long series of poetic miscellanies whose primary purpose was to disseminate obscene satirs on Puritanism. Called "drolleries," these persisted forty years after the Puritans were gone as vehicles for the publication of songs that had too little literary elevation or dignity to be printed on their own."

 http://www.horntip.com/mp3/1700s/1700ca--1962ca_lyrica_erotica_vol_3_womens_delight__ed_mccurdy_%28LP%29/index.htm

It was the Civil Wars in England (1642–1651) that removed the restrictions on land enclosures so that any landowners became rich through the enclosure of the commons, while many ordinary folk had a centuries-old right taken away. Land enclosure has been rightly condemned as a gigantic swindle on the part of large landowners. An offence that remains unaddressed to this day. In the 17th and 18th centuries drolleries had a lot to be droll about I think.
Bawdy songs are an outpouring of moral laxity underlying pretty risky places to be back then in one of the burgeoning towns and cities as a homeless incomer seeking work, play and entertainment. With around 200 hundred crimes for which you could be hanged, troublesome elements if caught, were rapidly and permanently despatched from the urban landscape. In the insanitary conditions diseases were rife, the Great Plague of London in 1665-66 for example killed an estimated 100,000 people, about 15% of London's population. 

Gin fuelled lasciviousness was one of the ways the working classes dealth with the stresses of urbanisation, the social dislocation and the squalid living conditions. Brothels and stews provided  a welcome distraction for all who invested in them, but the bawdy and the scandalous were accepted forms of theatrical entertainment in the form of both plays and stand up comedians between scenes that were known as Jiggs, with their 'scurrilous songs and obscene gestures', Jiggs would act as appetizers for later pleasures on offer.

By Elizabethan times, the sale of sex was a normal part of the commerce of the capital.. The whitewashed brothels of Southwark which was then London's red-light district were called "stews" because of their origins as steambath houses. These were actually a throw back to the Romans and it was believed that the steam was a cure for venereal diseases, although it was actually the place where you were most likely to catch them, but there were rivals to the stews. Prostitutes were also active in the theatres of the day which often doubled as profitable brothels and which is how actress became a metaphor for a lady of the night, although on reflection actually it is probably a better description of their trade than is the modern term escort I think.

The bawdy ballad was the advertising jingle performed at competing brothels by singers, the lyrics of which are intended to seduce and deprave the passer-by into allowing curiosity to draw him first in to the premises and then undoubtedly also into one of its occupants at the very least. So the purpose was to inflame the passions in an environment where competition was pretty intense. This led to a competative edge to the ballads each attempting to be more offensive, profane and lecherous than the others. Many people approved. Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch doctor in London in 1724 wrote a defence of public stews, "for the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most of the mischievous effects of the vice," he said, "but even lessen the quantity of whoring in general and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can possibly be contained in".

Interesting I think that this seems to remain the Dutch view of prostitution today, but not to be diverted from our mission here I think the time might be right at this point to look a little more closely at the music itself.

Fortunately thanks to the diligence and dedication of collectors quite a few of these ballads still exist. A couple of years ago I acquired a CD by The City Waites a group of early music specialists called Bawdy Ballads of Old England: The Mufitians of Grope Lane with some great bawdy broadsides from 17th century England.

Unfortunately there are very few of the songs from the album on YouTube the only one I could find was The Jovial Lass, or Dol and Roger which I have posted here.

The thing that I think is interesting about this song (and this is a feature also seen in other contemporary ballads) is the depiction of country folk as naive simpletons. In this song the hapless Roger has to be instructed by Dol as to what exactly goes where, having abandoned milking her cow to have a romp in the grass with the lad. This I think emphasises the way even the lower orders of city dwellers looked down upon what they perceive to be untutored country bumpkins. Undoubtedly an unfair portrayal in the following case because rural farm workers were I'm sure more clued up about mamalian reproduction than the average city slum dweller, but this is really about attitude and lifestyle.

Roger remains nonplussed throughout the whole episode and is even perplexed by sudden appearance of his own semen, but Dol soon puts him right in the verse that goes:-

"Oh foolish Hodge - tis milk" quoth Dol
"Tis pleasant, tis good , tis neat,
though i would rather stroke a man
than draw on a cow's teat"

Milkmaids like Dol often feature as erotic fantasy figures in English folklore, in the William Hogarth print above The Enraged Musician the central female figure is a milkmaid who incoidentally seems to be based upon Jane Hogarth the artist's wife as the model.

Dol is a common stereotype in these ballads an opportunist sexual predator who spends her otherwise dismal existence craving men to sport and play with her in a devil-may-care... live now pay later...obsession and a sort of desperate gin fueled lust.
This is the voice however of the new savvy urban underbelly of England's city life speaking here in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The ones who have left the countryside far behind them and like thousands of other dispossessed and impoverished landless farm workers who have drifted into towns in search of work and the 'bright lights' ...or at least the red lights of the big city.
The ones who avoided being hanged for one offence or another mixed in an underworld of prostitutes, musicians, actors and actresses, cut-purses and pickpockets. Here balladeers would entice men into the houses of disrepute (which were sometimes just a backroom of a pub) with songs that might make a rapper blush, let alone a God fearing soul.
The tradition of performing bawdy ballads was cocking a snook at puritanism, deriding the countryfolk left behind for their innocence and lack of worldliness. It is a view of the world that gives insight into the emerging urban working classes and the stinking open sewers that many inner city streets were at the time where disease and all manner of hazards to trap the unway or kill the unfortunate.
The bawdy broadside ballad was then a sort of rebel song as well as a ribald song the cocky swagger of the streetwise rake and a celebration of drunkeness, indecency and the supremacy of unbridled lust intended to give the proverbial finger to the Puritan killjoys and their successors that eventually morphed into the Victorian middle class... whose attitudes we are still living with here in England to some significant degree today.

One last song from The City Waites which is not a bawdy ballad but is a broadside ballad called Old England that at least gives an brief opportunity to see this wonderful group in action. Enjoy!