ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Baring-Gould's collection of broadsides, and his use and analysis of them. It examines the collections of broadside ballads made by some other English folk song collectors working around the same time - William Barrett, Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson, Cecil Sharp, and Ralph Vaughan Williams and comment on their use of those collections to inform the study of the songs they collected. In his manuscripts, the references he cites show that a large proportion of the broadsides that he linked to songs in his collection were those that he had found in the British Museum collections. In July 1889, Baring-Gould wrote an introductory article titled 'Ballads in the West' for the journal the Western Antiquary. The library has a card catalogue of the collection but not an electronic version. He have also seen the volume in the National Library of Wales, which contains only nineteenth-century ballads.
