ABSTRACT
Richard Rigby's ballad corpus was published at a peak both of political upheaval in the 1680s and of political ballad production. As a liveried company, "cordwainers" were in a superior trade position to mere cobblers, but Rigby frequently interchanged the words "cobbler" and "shoomaker" in his songs and there is no evidence that he was ever admitted to the Cordwainers' Company of London. Rigby's songs were also deeply embedded within broadside ballad genres and trends. By drawing upon the publisher's well-informed sensitivity, scholars of popular mentalites can go some way towards mitigating the notorious lack of readership evidence that broadside ballads present. The political world of the ballad in seventeenth-century England that is revealed by such an approach shows that ordinary people accessed ideas from a wide range of popular and classical texts, with which they constructed concepts of justice and good governance.
