The Impact of Increased Literacy on Ballads and Chapbooks in Seventeenth-Century England

The Impact of Increased Literacy on Ballads and Chapbooks in Seventeenth-Century England

In seventeenth-century England, the rise of popular education and literacy coinciding with the mechanical technology of printing, led to the decline in the creation of ballads and in the importance of chapbooks.

After England's Restoration period, inexpensive print was available in large quantities due to new technological innovations in the printing field. Almanacs became important for households on all social levels to own and approximately four hundred thousand were printed in the 1660s annually. Bibles were also being printed in great amounts, though less than almanacs due to the fact that they did not become out-dated.

Early in the seventeenth-century England underwent "a form of phenomenon a little like that phenomenon of the Great Rebuilding and is very likely related to it" (9). This upsurgance of spending power enabled the yeomanry of the countryside to send their sons to school. Free from the labor force, these boys were taught to read and write. Fathers who were not as wealthy as the yeomen, still could send their sons to school until they were of working age, about six or seven. These lower class boys were taught to read, but writing was taught at a later age. This increase in the amount of the population that could read and write was extremely significant, transforming England from the fourteenth-century to the sixteenth century from a late medieval peasant society, to a society in which reading and writing were used by more people, and on all social scales, for education and entertainment. Approximately thirty percent of men in the latter half of the seventeenth-century were literate. Sixty-five percent of the yeomen w...

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...rich widow, waiting at the same place to go through the ceremony with him" (56). Regional chapbooks were written, with the characters talking in local dialects and usually mocking another region of England or a person visiting from a foreign country.

The rise in literacy and the decrease of printing costs that simultaneously occurred in the seventeenth century, had both negative and positive effects on the socio-economic structure of England. The oral tradition of ballads, and the social community centered around it, were lost. Literacy brought self-education through books and entertainment from chapbooks to hundreds of yeomen, farm labors, tradesmen, and some lower class poor.

Work Cited

Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1981.