CATALOGUE

OF

A COLLECTION OF

PRINTED BROADSIDES

IN THE POSSESSION OF

The Society of Antiquaries of London

COMPILED BY

ROBERT LEMON, ESQ., F.S.A.

PUBLIC

PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON.

1866.

DUPLICATE:
TO BE KEPT

THENES

PUB

52440

ASTOR AT924 vo TILDEN FOUNDATIONS? 1947.

WESTMINSTER:

PRINTED BY J. B. NICHOLS AND SONS,

25, PARLIAMENT STREET.

PREFACE.

THE collection of papers which forms the subject of the present Catalogue has long been in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries. Within the last few years H. R. H. the late Prince Consort, and several other Fellows and Friends of the Society, have enriched it by valuable donations,* but in the year 1765 Bishop Percy referred to several ballads mentioned in the present Catalogue, as being "preserved in the archives of the Antiquarian Society, in a large folio Collection of Proclamations, &c. made in the reigns of King Henry VIII., King Edward VI., Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James I., &c." (Reliques of English Poetry, ii. 66.) The same collection was mentioned again, in 1781, by Warton, in his History of English Poetry (iii. 145), and many subsequent writers upon our early poetical literature have from time to time referred to some or other of its curious contents.

The words which we have quoted from Bishop Percy connect the Ballads in the possession of the Society with the Proclamations, and down to the year 1852 Proclamations, Ballads, and many other papers printed ballad-wise, on one side of a sheet or strip of paper, which now all pass under the general name of Broadsides, formed one collection in the Society's Library.

The earliest trace in the Society's Minute Books of the ́ formation of this collection occurs under the date of the 9th April, 1756, when Dr. Gifford, of the British Museum, the editor of the Society's edition of Folkes's Tables of Coins, reported to the Council, that under an authority previously given, he had purchased for the Society, at the sale of the

* The names of these Donors will be found commemorated in the Index to the present Catalogue, p. 196.