ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a song which was really popular, one which has lasted some 330 years, and is still sung in Britain, the United States and Eire, and probably elsewhere too. That song is known today as The Banks of the Sweet Vilidee, sometimes as The Distressed Ship's Carpenter, and probably most often as James Harris, the titles by which it was known to Francis James Child, editor of the monumental 1882-1898 edition of what he termed The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The chapter examines work on the earliest known broadside texts of what was called A Warning for Married Women, dating from seventeenth-century London. The entry for Laurence Price revealed him to be awriter of ballads and political squibs, who was a native of London, and who compiled between 1625 and 1680 numberless ballads, pamphlets, and broadsides in verse on political and social subjects.
