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  • The Lady Marques in Context

    William Elderton’s A proper new balad of my ladie marques, Whose death is bewailed To the tune of new lusty gallant was not the only eulogy published in 1569. Thomas Newton penned a steadfastly Protestant panegyric to Lady Katherine Knollys. Katherine, who may have been the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII, was also a confidante…

  • The Ladie Marques and the Lusty Gallant

    With apologies for the length of the delay between posts (brought about by a computer faliure), here is the second piece about Elizabeth Parr and William Elderton: William Elderton’s A proper new balad in praise of my Ladie Marques (London, 1569; STC (2nd ed.) / 7562) is unique among the surviving early ballad epitaphs in…

  • William Elderton and the Ladie Marques part 1

    I’ve been doing a lot of work on ballad epitaphs in recent months, inspired by a William Elderton ballad entitled A proper new balad of my ladie marques, Whose death is bewailed To the tune of new lusty gallant. The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that the epitaph had a named, known…

  • Ballads, burnings and the British Academy

    If the blog has been a little bit quiet lately, it’s not just because of the teaching.  It’s also because I’ve been trying to set aside a couple of days each week to work on the book.  This task was interrupted at the end of January by the news that the application that I made…

  • Drums, Bugles, and Bagpipes in the Seven Years’ War

    Daniel Laxer Historians tend to overlook the role of musical instruments in the Seven Years’ War. Few devote much attention to explaining how armies operated or battles played-out. Fred Anderson’s … Source: Drums, Bugles, and Bagpipes in the Seven Years’ War