The OED defines promiscuous as “consisting of members or elements of different kinds grouped or massed together without order; of mixed and disorderly composition or character.” Perhaps the clearest conclusion we can come to when looking at the “Promiscuous Supplement” in Pepys’s collection of ballads is that Pepys knew the meaning of promiscuous. There is no evident thematic, generic, or stylistic logic to the group (beyond them being ballads, of course). The stationers for whom these ballads were printed and a rough correspondence in date provide the most unified characteristics in grouping. These characteristics can lead to some very tentative and speculative conclusions about why Pepys created this category and placed it where he did.

The ballads represented in the “Promiscuous Supplement” have a wide range of topics and would fit into several other of the categories Pepys used to organize the collection. There are ballads about drinking and hospitality, ballads on pleasant and unpleasant love, historical ballads, ballads that retell classical stories, and so on. Five of the forty-one ballads in this collection appear in other sections of Volume 1: “The Bloody Murther of Sir John Barley-Corn” accompanied by “How Mault deals with every man” is also in Pepys’s “Drinking and Good Fellowship” section. The “Devotion and Morality” section contains “The Constancy Susanna” (titled “The Ballad of Constant Susanna”) and “The Patient Grisell.” And, finally, “Cripple of Cornwall” and “Constance of Cleveland” appear in the “Tragedy” section. All of these ballads contain either different woodcuts or lack woodcuts the other version contains and are published by different stationers.¹

These reprints do point to one feature that possibly distinguishes the “Supplement” from the rest of Volume 1 of Pepys’s collection: the majority were printed for the ballad partners and they all seem to have been printed after 1660.² All but one (“Old Christmas Returned,” printed for P. Brooksby) were printed by some combination of ballad partners. The imprint for fifteen of the ballads name J.Clarke, W.Thackery, & T. Passinger, with three more naming J.C., W.T., T.P and one J.C, W.T, & T. Passinger, bringing the total of ballads printed for these three stationers to nineteen, nearly half. Adding John Wright to this group accounts for another eight, while Thackery and Passinger alone make up another nine. F. Coules and T. Vere are included with all four above-mentioned partners on two more ballads. P. Brooksby shows up alone on one ballad as the only non-ballad partner stationer in the “Supplement.”

Though the Pepys catalogue does not date any of these ballads, we can approximate a broad timeframe in which these were published by looking at the years of publishing activity for these stationers. William Thackery and Thomas Passinger, whose names appear on all the ballads in the supplement except for Brooksby’s, were only both active printers from 1664-88.³ John Wright 3 was active from 1663-84, John Clarke from 1651-86, F. Coules from 1624-63, and Thomas Vere from 1646-82. Though according to Watt’s dating F. Coules’s publishing activity ends in 1663, a year before Thackery and Passinger’s begins, his name shows up on ballad imprints through 1680.⁴ Thus, we can infer that the earliest likely date of print for any of these ballads is around 1663-4 and the latest likely date is 1682-88. Brooksby was an active publisher from 1670-96, and the imprint specifically mentions being allowed by R. L’estrange and so must have been printed in or prior to 1688, the last year L’estrange held the job of surveyor of the press.

It is unlikely that Pepys grouped these ballads together because of the stationers who brought them to press, but the dating of this group, broad though it is, does reveal a distinction between the supplement and the rest of Volume 1. The volumes of this ballad collection are by no means rigorously or primarily chronological; nevertheless, the majority of Volume 1 of Pepys’s ballad collection seems to contain works that date from the early to mid seventeenth century. On a fairly cursory search through the Pepys catalog, I was unable to find any dated ballads later than the 1630’s. The majority are undated, but nevertheless the consistency of the dated ballads is suggestive. In looking through the Pepys catalogue of Volume 2, I was only able to find nine dated prior to 1680, and the majority are dated in the 1690’s. However, ballads from Volumes 3 and 4 seem to span the 1670’s to the 1690’s and thus Volumes 2, 3, and 4, show no real distinction in dating. Volume 5 is reserved for white-letter ballads and so does tend to be later, though that distinction seems to be primarily one of typeface. Thus even though the ballad collection does not pay close attention to chronology, Volume 1 seems to maintain a more distinct timeframe than do Volumes 2-4. This raises the possibility that Pepys placed these ballads in a supplement at the end of the volume because he recognized that they were printed a bit later than the other ballads in the volume.

This still doesn’t explain why Pepys didn’t put these ballads in the other volumes; the dates of printing would generally have allowed it. But it is interesting to note that Pepys did not include the “Promiscuous Supplment” in the table of contents. Perhaps the table of contents that spans all five volumes of the collection necessitated binding Volume 1 last and so this volume remained changeable after the others were bound. And perhaps Pepys either found or newly acquired this set of ballads after the other volumes had been bound and so he decided to include them in Volume 1. And perhaps rather than inserting them into the various categories of the volume, he decided to keep them together in their own section because of their later date. Perhaps. Or perhaps he just didn’t have the energy to sort through another stack of ballads.

~ Eric Nebeker

Works Cited

Pepys, Samuel. The Pepys Ballads: Facsimile Volume. Ed. W.G. Day. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987.

¹ It is remotely possible that the printings of “The Cripple of Cornwall” and “Constance of Cleveland” in the “Promiscuous Supplement” simply add some stationers to the list. In the “Supplement” the stationers listed for “The Cripple” are J. Wright, J. Clarke, W. Thackery, and T. Passigner; those listed for “ Constance” are F. Coules, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke. In the tragedy group, “The Cripple” and “Constance” are printed for I.W. and I. Wright, respectively. It is likely that J. Wright, I. Wright, and I. W. all mean John Wright; however, there were at least three different John Wright printers. John Wright 1 and 2 were cousins and John Wright 3 was John Wright 2’s son. However, we can fairly safely identify J. Wright and I.W. from the “Promiscuous Supplement” as John Wright 3 because the other printers listed were contemporaries of John Wright 3. As for the printings of “The Cripple” and “Constance” in the “Tragedy” group, all the other reprints date from the first half of the seventeenth century, and so it seems a bit more likely that John Wright 1, possibly 2, is the stationer listed on the ballads, though this conclusion is clearly speculative.

² The dating refers only to these specific printings, not to when they might have been written or first published.

³ Both began printing in 1644, but Thackery was active until 1692. This information on publishing activity comes from Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, eds. Anthony Fletcher, John Guy and John Morril (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 276-7.

⁴ See Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557-1709), 2 ed. (Hatboro, PA: Tradition Press, 1967): 4, Cyprian Blagden, "Notes on the Ballad Market in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century," Studies in Bibliography 6 (1953-4): 162.