Some Scary Ballads

And the history of popular culture

The Murder of Mary Cox

Discussions of popular versus elite culture, on Substack as elsewhere, often suffer from conceptual confusion. The “elite” half of the distinction is clear enough: elite culture is by and for elites, whether by birth or training. It’s the “popular” that’s ambiguous. Does it refer to culture by the people, the masses of the uncredentialed and unconnected? Or merely culture for the people, commercial products targeted at the widest possible market? True, there’s a lot of overlap between the two, especially in the internet age. But critics often don’t make even minimal attempts to untangle them. At times, the confusion feels strategic: a defense of democratic, folk aesthetics is a lot more appealing than a defense of the culture industry.

It’s not a new problem. In fact, it goes back to the very origin of mass market literary culture in English—the broadside ballad. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English and Scottish philologists, swept up in the nationalist enthusiasms of the age, began to collect examples of popular culture. Ballads came to seem like the epitome of folk literature: the authentic voice of the common people, authorless, emanating directly from the community. When Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote their Lyrical Ballads, with its deliberately contrapuntal title, it was this conception of the ballad they had in mind.

It was an idea that remained in force until very recently.¹ Unfortunately, it’s completely wrong. In Continental Europe, there are examples of ballads that really do seem to spring from an immemorial folk culture—or, at any rate, ballads whose origins have been lost in the mists of time. But English has no surviving ballad of impeccably medieval provenance. It’s only in the sixteenth century that the tradition really picks up: as it turns out, the eighteenth-century ballad enthusiasts were, for the most part, collecting the handiwork of canny, London publishers.

Far from being a product of an unmediated folk culture, then, the broadside ballad was the first popular literary product of the new, centralized print culture based in the metropolis. Its authors were generally working class, and educated poets of the time never got tired of heaping scorn on their writing. For playwrights, who were also working in a popular commercial genre, it was undoubtedly a bit too close for comfort. But though ballad writers such as William Elderton, Martin Parker (arguably the greatest of the age) or Laurence Price weren’t aristocrats, they weren’t illiterate peasants either. Rather, they were (mostly) hack writers hired by the London publishers: capable of real artfulness alongside silly sensationalism, and always possessing a feel for the demands of the market. The spread of these ballads across England signaled the emergence of a new era in the history of culture: the rise of a mass, popular commercial culture, which was for but not necessarily by the common people.²

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s easy to see a link between ballads and modern, secular popular culture in a way that isn’t true of a lot of earlier forms. Many of the ballads we have today were preserved by Samuel Pepys (he’s inescapable), who inherited the great legal scholar John Selden’s ballad collection and expanded it. Pepys divided his approximately 1,800 ballads into ten categories:

1. Devotion and Morality. 2. History, true and fabulous. 3. Tragedy, viz.murders, executions, judgements of God. 4. State and Times. 5. Love, pleasant. 6. Love, unfortunate. 7. Marriage, cuckoldry. 8. Sea: love, gallantry, and actions. 9. Drinking and good fellowship. 10. Humorous frolics and mirth.

True crime, which falls under the rubric of “tragedy,” was an especially popular genre. It’s not the source of the highest quality ballads from a literary perspective. (The best ballads are usually about money. See the footnote for an example.)³ But, though I’m not a true crime reader or viewer in the present, I do get the appeal. They tell stories like that of Richard Price,⁴ a weaver who beat three apprentices in a row to death before being hanged:

Never went they without
bruised and broken eyes,
Head and face black and blue,
such was their miseries

Similarly, “The Whipster of Woodstreet” tells the story of the murder of a maidservant, Mary Cox, by her mistress, who tortured her to death over the course of several days.

This monster not satisfied yet,
tho' the blood run from every part,
Made an Iron red hot in a pet,
resolving to give her more smart,
she burnt her in shoulders and thighs,
and sev'ral times under her ears,
she wou'd not come near her Eyes,
lest th'iron shou'd be quench'd with her tears.

The ballads about Price and Cox are reasonably factual. Others take things in… a different direction. “A Warning for all Murtherers” describes how David Williams and his pregnant wife were stabbed by his scheming cousins. Right before dying, Mrs Williams (no first name given) delivers her child. The boy turns out to be an agent of vengeance: before he turns five, he’s killed all three of his parents’ murderers:

The child under the Table got,
unthought of any one,
And bit his Cousin by the legge,
hard at the ankle bone,
Which by no helpe nor Art of man
could ever healed be,
But sweld and rotted in such sort,
that thereof dyed he.

Not full a twelve-month after this,
this child did chance to be,
Whereas the second murderer
was drinking merrily:
He tooke one of the biggest pinnes
that stuck about his brest,
And thrust it in his Kinsmans thigh,
where then the signe did rest.

The last surviving murderer gets a sharp stick shoved down his throat while he’s sleeping. “A Warning for Murtherers” works because it’s so absurd. Other ballads take things further: revenge is a matter of indelible bloodstains, ghosts, and—of course!—monstrous births. In “The Lamenting Lady,” a barren rich woman mocks a poor one for having twins, and, as punishment, gives birth to 365 children at once.

In general, the sillier broadside ballads are, the more fun they are to read today. The more we can imagine them as naive—the more they invite confusion between the two senses of popularity—the more readable they remain.

Since it’s almost Halloween, I’ll give the last word to the ballad “The Lunatic Lover”

Grim King of the Ghosts make hast,
and bring hither all your Train,
See how the Pale Moon doth wast,
and just now is in the Wain.

Come all you Night-Hags with all your Charms,
and revelling Witches away,
And hug me close in your Arms,
to you my respects I'll pay.

I'll court you and think you fair;
since Love does distract my Brain,
I'll go and I'll wed the Night Mare,
and kiss her and kiss her again:

But if she proves peevish and proud,
then a pise of her Love let her go,
I'll seek me a winding Shroud,
and down to the Shades below.

1. There’s a lot of very good research on the ballad now, but the really seminal study was Tessa Watt’s excellent Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (1993). Watt was the social historian Margaret Spufford’s student, and the connection between the two isn’t hard to see. She now seems to have become a mindfulness guru! What a world!

2. Its emergence was directly connected to the rise of centralized national markets, not only via the book trade, but also in terms of its channels of distribution: the peddlers who brought cheap commodities from the center to the periphery also sold ballads. Think of Shakespeares’ Autolycus. Except they did a lot more than Autolycus in helping to form national markets, since they also often carried raw commodities back to London or, in some cases, served as factors or agents.

3. “Nobody Loves Me.” A couple of stanzas:

When as I had no want, each one would lend me,
Now that my mony is skant, they say, God send yee:
They leave Pearce-penniles, with high disdaining,
And all are pittiles, to my complaining:
Their words are guilded faire,
Their deedes bace copper ware,
Now I am waxen bare,
Nobody loves me
...

If I be once rich againe, I wil be wiser,
And learne of money-men to be a Miser:
Rather then lend a groat to one or other,
Ile helpe to cut his throat, were he my brother.
I will shut up my doore,
Alwaies against the poore:
So Karls doe get their store.
No body loves mee.

4. Scott Oldenburg has a very good essay on the horrific crimes of Richard Price in ballads and in the parish registers in a special issue of JMEMS on literature and demographic history that I edited.