ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 offers an extended overview of the tradition’s multitude of early modern broadside ballads and prose chapbooks between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It is argued that the English tradition became increasingly conservative and hierarchical in this printed street literature, with the carnival elements stripped away or self-consciously contained and remediated. When printed in cultural centres under the potential gaze of the censor, the King and Commoner tradition gradually became transformed into royalist street propaganda to aid in the ascension of new monarchs. This chapter ends by looking at the contrast between the English ballad of King James I and the Tinker (1745) and a handful of eighteenth-century Scottish Jacobite tales, which perhaps see this monarchic patriotism being turned back into resistance north of the border.
