ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine native practices of scurrility which involved the composition and transmission of libellous verse. 'Libel' was a term used to describe any piece of writing seen as 'politically controversial or socially scandalous'. The form could include pamphlets, speeches and political declarations; however, libels were most commonly in verse, and could stretch from a pithy epigram to a lengthy ballad.3 Historians of political culture have demonstrated the prevalence of libelling in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and literary historians are beginning to follow their lead into this body of poetry.41 am concerned here, however, with libels produced in provincial contexts and concerned with fundamentally local tensions. Such
poems were not transmitted into the manuscript sources of an elite literary culture, but rather survive only when a matter was brought to court in a libel action. The work of Adam Fox has revealed a wealth of such texts in Jacobean Star Chamber records, and my essay represents the work of a literary scholar asking a new set of questions of this material.5 In particular, I want to consider the cultural functions and textual qualities of the poems, and to explore the extent to which they represent a popular poetic tradition which may be interrelated with the contemporary vogue for neo-classical satire.
