To ‘ballad’ someone in seventeenth-century London meant to libel them in a song: ballad-singers were often on the wrong side of the law. Singers in the employ of the rich, or serving their municipalities as ‘waits’, were well-paid and legally protected. But in 1597 ‘wandering minstrels’ with no licence to perform were officially condemned to be whipped till they bled, ‘burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’, and sent to a house of correction.

Yet the country was awash with printed songs. They were pasted up on walls in city streets and taverns, and were sold in every market and at every fair; trade was particularly brisk at public executions. These were the penny-dreadfuls of the day.

Printed in bold ‘blackletter’ type on one side of a folio, these song sheets were known as broadsides, and the diarist Samuel Pepys was an avid collector of them. So were those who saw in them a commercial opportunity; songbooks became a profitable business. Most were filled with popular tunes by contemporary composers, with John Playford’s English Dancing Master going through eighteen editions. As the leading authority on British folk music Steve Roud observes, it’s worth remembering that in seventeenth-century London, musical literacy among the poor was high: Mr Pepys’s servant boy and all Mrs Pepys’s maids were sight-readers and instrumentalists.

The first songbook with antiquarian ambitions was published by Thomas Percy in 1765 as the three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, but its genesis was accidental. Percy was a cleric who eventually became a bishop, but he was also a well-connected poet and man of letters. While visiting a friend he noticed a sheaf of papers ‘lying dirty on the floor, under a bureau in the parlour’, which maids were using as firelighters. This turned out to be a miscellany of old songs and poems, albeit damaged and incomplete. He took it home and knocked it into shape. Two similar collections had recently been published without exciting interest, but friends including Samuel Johnson encouraged Percy to publish his. The poet William Shenstone, another of those friends, urged him to include additional songs culled from libraries, but to rewrite anything he deemed inelegant; ‘mere historical merit’, said Shenstone, was ‘not a sufficient recommendation for inclusion’.