The ballad "Londons Ordinarie" (1.192-193) presents the viewer with two opposing woodcuts. In the first woodcut, people provide a two-dimensional and ill-proportioned ornament to a central speaker; they define and enclose the space like a border. The second woodcut portrays the momentary and anonymous encounter of travelers passing in the woods; it possesses a sense of depth and real space as a trail winds off into the horizon, and details of tree trunks in the foreground hint that the viewer shares this space too. I would like to suggest that the contrast between these two woodcuts offers us a way to approach the ballads of "State and Times." It is a contrast between the controlled and defined, and the momentary and passing. Seen in the context of the ballad itself and in the wider context of "State and Times," this contrast will indicate a dialogue between social interactions which are ordered and defining, and those that are precarious and changing.

The content of "Londons Ordinarie" is similar to many of the ballads in "State and Times": it is a list of professions and social stations, with some indication of their corresponding vices. The ballad begins in the Royal Exchange, a monument to controlled and settled trade.¹ From this point, social groups disperse to various eating houses, the names of which, as puns on a group’s trade or status, constitute the spaces as socially appropriate and defining. Hence the “The Knights went to the golden Fleece,/ and the Plow-man to the Clowne” and so on. This movement from the center to defining spaces differs from similar ballads such as "Room for Companie" (1.168-169)—occurring at the semi-permanent Bartholomew Fair—where the professions converge and mix, actions that seem to belie difference.

Patricia Fumerton has suggested that in a period of relative mobility in the labor force—a mobility across space, professions, and economic status—ballads such as these offered a “’no cost’ multifarious role speculation” to the ballad audience, through reading and recitation.² In this way, "Londons Ordinarie" and similar ballads recreate or make possible mobility across professions. But they simultaneously, as is especially evident in "Londons Ordinarie," undermine that mobility, by carefully defining and demarcating these same professions. Indeed, "Londons Ordinarie" ends on the ominous word “Gallowse” as if to emphasize the ultimate authority maintaining this carefully described order. Furthermore, the focus on the corruption and vices of these trades potentially provides a way for the ballad audience to understand or categorize and thereby control potential situations and persons that they might face.

"Dice, Wine and Women" (1.200-201), characteristic of another ballad type in "State and Times," begins with a man’s journey from Cornwall to London. His visit to London comprises a movement between districts accompanied by his losing of money to various rogues. He ends up wandering London poor, “stript,” and with all the doors of the city literally shut against him. It is not until his mobility is restricted, in the form of confinement in a work house or bridewell, that his poverty can be redressed. It is there that a friend recognizes him and frees him. Freed, though still poor, he returns to his native Cornwall, giving up London, and presumably intending to take up his old life.

On the one hand, this ballad offers a simple critique of a lifestyle associated with mobility and anonymous (read dishonest) encounters with miscreants: a lifestyle which literally strips a man of all distinction and rank, and leaves him poor and placeless. The response to this lifestyle, as occurs in many ballads, is to renounce it, to reestablish more permanent social ties (stressed by his friend’s recognition), and presumably to return to a more stable profession. In other words, the solution is a return to the fixity undone by London (Fumerton 204).

On the other hand, "Dice, Wine, and Women" and similar ballads give the audience a look into the lifestyle of rogues who live in the liminal and temporary spaces of alehouses and seem to have no profession. Current theory surrounding these rogues suggests that they represent proto-capitalists capable of successfully negotiating the changing economic landscapes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³ Indeed, in "Knavery in all Trades" (1.166-167) a man laments that one has to cheat to survive, “For none can thrive at this day,/but such as their mindes doe give:/ To over-reach and deceive.” The ballad audience probably also identified with these proto-capitalist characters, who, in their mobility and cunning, overturn hierarchy by stripping rank from a wealthy man. Read in this way, even as this ballad ostensibly renounces the roguish lifestyle, it also celebrates the way these characters successfully manipulate the prevailing conditions of London to their advantage.

The ambivalent message of this and other ballads in "State and Times" leads us back to the two contrasting woodcuts we examined at the beginning of this essay. In the first woodcut of "Londons Ordinarie," by being carefully defined and ordered, people become inhuman and flat ornament; whereas in the second woodcut, the passing travelers are portrayed realistically and in real space. The dialogue between the stability yet seeming dehumanization in the first and the precarious mobility yet undeniable humanness in the second plays out in a complicated way in "State and Times." It is perhaps significant that in one of the most powerful ballads in this selection, "The Beggers Intrusion" (1.216-217), the beggar with his vagrancy and poverty, provides both the ultimate threat to the other characters in the ballad and also ultimately the conscience of the piece. It is the beggar’s outcast position that allows him to approach and then reproach people of all stations and trades for their vices. At the same time, it is the threat of falling into that same outcast position that serves as the impetus for these people to reform.

I have attempted to highlight what I see as a dialogue between mobility and fixity (both across space and status) that plays out in this group of ballads. It provides one possible approach to "State and Times." I do not claim that my interpretation is exhaustive, and indeed it may suggest greater uniformity than actually exists in this category. Individuals interested in a variety of fields will find subjects in this group valuable to their studies: gender roles, urban spaces, colonization, and justice, to name just a few. I have also not addressed the grouping itself; that is, the process of categorization and selection that Pepys would have undertaken to create "State and Times." Yet, hopefully, by emphasizing this particular theme, I have given some insight into the general nature of these ballads and perhaps even into the process of selection that put them together.

~ Paxton Hehmeyer

Works Cited

Dionne, Craig and Steve Mentz Eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Fumerton, Patricia. “Making Vagrancy (In)visible: The Economics of Disguise in Early Modern Rogue Pamphlets.” Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 193-210.

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

1. I am not, however, proposing a simple dichotomy between country and city, since the country also acts as a location of vice. However, I might argue that the country is associated with greater stability and fixity than the fluid space of London. The one ballad that deals with the vices of the country and the city takes place on a road, thereby associating mobility between the locations with the vices in both (see I would you never have said so, Pepys 1.180-1.181).

2. For a discussion of changes in trade around in the 15 th and 16 th centuries, and especially for a discussion of the significance of the Royal Exchange, see Woodbridge, Linda. “The Peddler and the Pawn: Why Did Tudor England Consider Peddlers to Be Rogues?” Dionne, Craig, and Mentz, Steve, eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) 143.

3. “[Rogues were] the prototypes of the citizens of modern urban capitalism, in part because they provide a potent image of the social adeptness required in a society premised on mobility and the endlessly changing conditions of exchange that constitute modern capitalism” (Dionne, Craig, and Mentz, Steve. “Introduction: Rogues and Early Modern English Culture.” Dionne and Mentz. 8).