ABSTRACT
Indeed, Child's ballad concept went some way towards distinguishing the broadsides from what he called the 'popular' ballad, the latter being conceived as a form of poetry that evolved in a period prior to printing and 'book-culture'. In fact, what we do know is that the traceable beginnings of many, if not most, of the English-language ballads actually lie in cheap print of the broadside and chapbook kind, from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. Sensational as it seems, the narrative can be shown to have some real basis in the legal and theological climate of the early seventeenth century. The reasons for this freezing of the popular canon lay with the commercial interests of the monopoly cartel of London booksellers who found economic value in the continual reprinting of the same, increasingly obsolete, titles throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
