Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here. 

We should begin by explaining that there are actually 120 ballads on this website but appropriate historical tunes have only been identified for 100 of them, hence the title.

We here identify and present a body of the biggest hits from seventeenth-century England. Such an exercise has never been attempted before, and we hope that 100 Ballads will prove stimulating and valuable to a wide range of users.

If you want to know what people most liked to hear, read and look at in early-modern England, then you have come to the right place!

Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane