Special collections: Broadside Ballads
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.
About the collection
The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford hold nearly 30,000 songs, many of them unique survivals, printed from the 16th to the 20th centuries.
The majority are from the British Isles including English, Irish and Scottish publications. These items are the accumulation of several different collections which came to the Bodleian at different periods after its opening in 1602.
Searching for the Broadside ballads at the Bodleian
The records of broadside ballads are now available in the central catalogue of printed materials, SOLO. Individual ballad records can be retrieved directly from the main search interface. The ballads can also be viewed as a discrete collection.
Digital facsimiles of ballads
New, high-resolution images of the broadside ballads will be made available on Digital Bodleian in the summer of 2026, where they can be searched and browsed. Each image will also be linked to the associated record in SOLO, allowing users to navigate between the two resources.
Two images: on the left an original low resolution scan in black and white and on the right an example of the new colour high resolution images being taken
Previous Broadside ballads digital resource
At the end of 2024, the Bodleian Libraries reviewed a number of specialist digital resources, including the Bodleian Broadside Ballads online database. As a precaution, in line with University guidance on cyber-safety, these resources were taken offline.
At that point, it was decided that the data from the standalone Broadside Ballads resource would be incorporated into existing online services supported by the Bodleian Libraries.
This original standalone resource which hosted the Bodleian ballads online between 1999 and 2023 were supported by two ground-breaking, externally-funded digital projects, the first begun in 1995 and the second in 2011. Those projects have informed ballad research across the world, including published discussions of the intellectual and technical advances in ballads cataloguing.
- Mike Heaney, An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues, 2000 (PDF)
- Alex Franklin, 'Iconclass indexing; The Art of Illustration in Bodleian Broadside Ballads Before 1820', The Bodleian Library Record, Volume 17, Number 5 (2002)
- Joon Son Chung, Relja Arandjelović, Giles Bergel, Alexandra Franklin, and Andrew Zisserman, Re-presentations of art collections (2015) – also available on the Oxford University Research Archive
Other ballad 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.
