Back in January, the Historical Journal published an article I’d been working on since my trip to the English Broadside Ballad Archive Conference celebrating the database’s 25th anniversary back in 2023. Entitled ‘Providence, Editorial and News in Early Modern Ballads‘, it examines the role of religious moralising in early modern ballads.

I’m very fond of saying in public talks and undergraduate lectures that my PhD research showed us that sixteenth-century ballads had two main themes: God and death. Often mentioned in passing, God plays a much bigger role in some ballads than in others, and the sheer amount of religious moralising in some topical ballads has meant that these songs have been more or less written off. They don’t have enough content for some people to think of them as news – they claim to be news, but there’s no news in them. Or so they say.

I disagree. At least, I think that there is more to it than that. Sure, instead of giving a blow by blow account of the news story in question, these are songs that take a topical story and use it to tell the audience about how terrible their conduct has been and how they are being punished by God for what they have done (or how terrible was the conduct of the subject of the song, and how they were being punished for what they had done). This is providence – the working out of God’s ineffable plan for his world, which most early modern English people would have believed had been laid down at creation and could not be changed by any action on earth.

So imagine, just for a second, that you were an ordinary, godfearing person in sixteenth-century England. News of God’s divine judgement on his erring people would surely have been the most important news you could hear? And that’s why I think that many of the ballads that appear to be about morality are actually just as much, if not more, about the news – it’s just that the news is news out of heaven, not out of earth.

I’m happy to say that ‘Providence, Editorial and News in Early Modern Ballads’ was published Open Access, so it’s available for anyone to read.