The Collections

EBBA began in 2003 with the archiving of the single largest collection of black-letter broadside ballads of the seventeenth century: over 1,800 ballads in the five volume Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge (for more on the evolution and makeup of EBBA see About Us). We are currently archiving the second largest such collection of some 1,300-1,500 ballads: the Roxburghe Collection at the British Library. Our ultimate goal is to archive all surviving black-letter broadside ballads from England’s heyday of the printed ballad in the seventeenth century (when woodcut ornaments, printed tune titles, and black letter ruled). We estimate the number of such broadside ballads to be between 8,000 and 10,000. EBBA, however, will necessarily include earlier and later ballads as many collections are expansive in historical range. Still, as a matter of funding and time constraints, we will likely also have to restrict our purview to only portions of those larger collections that cross many centuries, such as the Luttrell collection at the British Library; otherwise, EBBA will become impossibly gargantuan. At all times, then, we prioritize the archiving of those collections and those parts of collections that privilege seventeenth-century ornamental black-letter broadside ballads.

Other important collections of seventeenth-century ballads that we have our sights on for future archiving include: John Bagford’s three volume collection as well as Narcissus Luttrell's three volume collection, and the Huth and Osterley Park collections-- all at the British Library; Anthony Wood's collection of various volumes as well as all or parts of the Firth, Douce, and Rawlinson collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the early collection of broadside ballads in the library of the Society of Antiquaries; the Suffolk collection (which was divided into the Huth collection held at the British Library and the Britwell collection held at the Huntington Library, Pasadena); the Halliwell and Euing ballads at the Chetham Library, Manchester; and numerous other smaller collections and miscellaneous ballads at the British Library, Glasgow Library, Harvard Library, Huntington Library, and elsewhere.