Broadsides

Although folk-carols, like all folk songs, might be transmitted ‘by ear’ – just hearing another singer or perhaps a family member singing them – transmission through printed ‘broadsides’ and other cheap print media was also important. Broadsides were commercially produced single sheets, sold for a penny by street vendors or hawkers at market fairs, from local shops and door-to-door by pedlars. Initially concentrated in London, Dublin and Edinburgh, by the 19th century there were printers at many provincial towns.

They were called ‘broadsides’ because they were printed on the broad side of the printing press (in today’s terminology: ‘landscape’ format, rather than ‘portrait’) and then cut up. Sometimes a large sheet was printed and then folded into 8, 12, 16 or 24 small pages, which could be simply stitched together to form ‘chapbooks’. These might contain short stories, fairy tales, religious tracts or folk songs – collections of songs were sometimes called ‘Garlands’. Chapbooks were designed to fit snugly into waistcoat pockets and were sold on the streets by ‘chapmen’.

The early broadsides (roughly 1550-1700 AD) used heavy Gothic typeface and were called ‘blackletter’ broadsides.¹ Laws, royal decrees, religious texts, moral warnings, news of executions, crimes, disasters, ‘monstrous births’ were published in the same format, but ballad verses were extremely popular, although very few were carols.² But early in the 18th century printers changed over to plainer Roman type ('white-letter'), which was clearer and easier to read. Woodcut illustrations were often used and re-used at the top of song and carol sheets. Printers like John Pitts³ in London began producing large-format Christmas carol sheets from around 1820 (multiple carols, decorated with imposing woodcut motifs). Colour printing was not possible, but you could buy hand-coloured versions for twice the price.

The Edwardian folksong collectors acquired their own sets of broadsides to check the development of carol texts (and songs generally). This enabled them to patch up or ‘correct’ any inadequacies of memory shown by particular singers they might encounter.⁴

Broadside printing was cheap because they were ‘words only’, no tunes. The process of ‘scoring’ or incising musical notes ⁵ and staves onto metal plates was laborious and expensive - some of the early carol books were printed with only limited numbers of tunes (melody only).⁶ Technology jumped forward in 1847 when the publisher Alfred Novello used a newly designed moveable metal type for musical notes and staves.⁷ This could produce a cheaper, multi-part score and subsequent carol books benefited greatly from this innovation.⁸ After this development, broadside ‘words only’ printing naturally began to fade.

Sources and reference books:

There are many libraries with broadsides in their collections, too many to mention here, but two online libraries can be recommended:

- Bodleian Library, Oxford:

https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections-and-resources/special-collections/finding-aids-and-catalogues/ballads

- EBBA: English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Good reference books include:

Shepard, Leslie, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1962)

Ed. John Payne Collier, Broadside Black-Letter Ballads (first printed 1868, new edition by British Library, 2011)

Eds. David Atkinson and Steve Roud, Street Ballads in Nineteenth Century Britain, Ireland and North America (Routledge, 2014).