Alternative ways to access the material

A listing of each of the Bodleian collections of broadside ballads is available below. The broadside ballad items in these collections are listed in order by shelfmark, with title and first line.

• Bodleian Ashmole collection
• Bodleian Curzon collection
• Bodleian Douce collection
• Bodleian Firth collection
• Bodleian Gough collection
• Bodleian Harding collection
• Bodleian John Johnson collection
• Bodleian Rare Books collection
• Bodleian Rawlinson collection
• Bodleian Wood collection

Other Broadside Ballads Online resources:

• An archived version of the Broadside Ballads Online site is available through the Internet Web Archive. Using the Collections tab on this site, users can browse through images of ballads in Bodleian collections.
• A representation of the Broadside Ballads Online data as RDF can be downloaded from the Oxford University Research Archive.
• The Visual Geometry Group also hosts a version of the ImageMatch tool for searching ballad illustrations.
• The Visual Geometry Group also hosts a version of the ImageBrowse demo, an analytical tool for searching ballad illustrations.
• The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library site hosts the Roud Index grouping ballads by folksong tradition.
• The English Broadside Ballad Archive contains ballads from other collections.

About the project

Broadside ballads, printed cheaply on one side of a sheet of paper from the earliest days of printing, contain song-lyrics, tunes and woodcut illustrations and bear news, prophecies, histories, moral advice, religious warnings, political arguments, satire, comedy and bawdy tales. Sold in large numbers on street-corners, in town-squares and at fairs by travelling ballad-singers and pinned on the walls of alehouses and other public places, they were sung, read and viewed with pleasure by a wide audience, but have been handed-down to us in only small numbers.

The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford holds nearly 30,000 songs, many of them unique survivals, printed from the 16th to the 20th Centuries. Digital facsimiles and an online database were first made accessible in 1999. Broadside Ballads Online updates that database and links it to other resources. The English Broadside Ballad Archive based in the Early-Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara specialises in ballads of the 17th century and provides full-text transcriptions, as well as images and catalogue records, of over 4,000 ballads.

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, based at the English Folk Song and Dance Society headquartered at Cecil Sharp House in London, maintains the Roud Broadside Index of references to songs which appeared on broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, and other cheap print publications, up to about 1920. Linked to the Roud Folk Song index, this provides a survey of the ballad tradition through its publishing history.

All data published on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Date when website was withdrawn:
29 November 2024