Political street songs and singers in seventeenth‐century England

Abstract

Live music was part of everyday life for people in early modern England. 1 It could be experienced in religious and secular places in many different forms, such as organ music and psalm singing in church; professional and amateur performances in taverns, alehouses, music-houses and theatres; musical calls of tradesmen and hawkers in the street; dance tunes played on bagpipe and fiddle at fairs and weddings; the humming of milk-maids or shoemakers at work; stirring martial music accompanying marching soldiers or recruiting parties. It could even be unavoidable 'musak'. For example, Coventry paid their city-waits £2 to £3 'to play on their instruments of music at two of the clock till break of day', 'through the whole city every morning from Michaelmas to 22 April yearly'. 2 London bellmen who were employed to act as night-watchmen, were not only expected to ring their bell and sing their verses out on the street, but also beneath the windows of prisons where those who were condemned to die the next day were lodged. 3 This dismal noise proved too much for two passers-by in 1687; they were accused of murdering bellman Peter Penrose for making such a racket. 4 Ballad singers and sellers were also unquestionably important contributors to the urban and rural soundscape in seventeenth-century England. Various records show them operating in urban and rural contexts right across the country. 5 Increasingly, as the century wore on, ballad singers and sellers 1 See Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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