This dissertation is about popular songs in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Starting with the Pepys Ballads and ending with Catnach's broadsides, it looks at how broadside and chapbook ballads represented rural labourers' identity during what was a period of significant economic and social change in the countryside. The erosion of customary rights, the enclosure of commons, the growing dependence on wages in a time of fluctuating grain prices, the decline of live-in service in the south, and the decrease in employment opportunities for rural women gave rise to a sense of injustice among agricultural labourers which found some expression in popular songs. Such songs of protest gained a new popularity after 1770 with both rural and urban audiences.;At the same time songs expressing pride in different agricultural occupations and celebrating the sexuality of labouring men and women were also printed in greater numbers. These songs may have appealed to an urban audience that idealized the countryside, but they may also have appealed to agricultural labourers themselves, because they constructed an attractive rural identity that held an important place within the culture.;While bearing in mind that, like all popular culture, songs reflected both popular and elite values, the dissertation argues that they allow the historian a glimpse of a popular voice that differed from other contemporary discourses and that can add a new dimension to our understanding of the history of this period.
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