By Meggie Hayes, History Teacher at The Crypt School in Gloucester.

If you ask students what a ballad is today, they will go straight to the talents of Adele and Lewis Capaldi – perhaps some of the more cultured of the class will recite the greats of the 80s like Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. But these answers – whilst bangers – are not the area a history teacher is likely to cover. Instead, I want my students to love the historical ballad. In my opinion, historical ballads are amazing to use in the classroom and I think we should all use them more than we do.

So, why ballads?

Simply put – ballads are fun, relatable and full of history. Ballads are lyrical poetry usually telling a story. They are as old as poetry itself – the works of Homer being sung generation after generation in ancient Greece and Rome.

Teaching with Ballads is amazing because students can do fantastic source analysis looking at both the macro and the micro gaining a deeper understanding of the period covered. Some teachers avoid using ballads due to their complexity of language but that is one of the many reasons I like to get students to dig their teeth in.

Reading classic Teaching History articles on using evidence prove why Ballads are the perfect source to use. Whether you are looking at McAleavy’s article discussing the birth of the ‘mini-gobbet’ and how it can make sources harder to understand due to the lack of detail or the fantastic ‘What’s the wisdom’ summary on using evidence and sources – ballads hit the mark. Why?

1. You can really make a fuss of it. Reading, listening, and often looking at the accompanying woodcut! There is so much to explore.

2. It builds the ‘atmosphere’ of the time improving contextual knowledge as you can literally give the Ballad a listen and imagine its chorus echoing through the Early Modern Period.

3. The use of poetry is a good exercise to practise distinguishing the difference between fact and inference as it complements their work in English Literature.

4. The province is often accessible and – hopefully – avoids the fear of the word bias. The use of a familiar tune means they can be sung by all – on the streets or the local alehouse (or perhaps even in the classroom).

How I use ballads in my teaching:

My favourite example of using ballads in teaching is a Year 8 lesson on witchcraft which is part of a source based mini-enquiry: ‘Why were women accused of being witches?’.

The ballad I chose is a story following three women accused of being witches as it explores their crimes, trial, and execution. I first get students to listen to the Ballad whilst reading a physical copy. To help students follow the ballad, they highlight content that will help them answer the enquiry question (with some modelling from the teacher). As the ballad is a story, we work together to unpick the narrative and discuss how this helps our enquiry. Students then work together to fill out a worksheet based of Riley’s work on ‘Layers of inference’ which allows students to consider the usefulness of the source thinking about what they tell us but also what they don’t tell us. There is also an opportunity to comment on the provenance of the ballad to stretch and challenge the class further.

Overall, students really impress me with the different inferences they pick up as each year I teach it, students come find something new or focus on a different aspect of the ballad. When this lesson is introduced, provenance is still a new concept to the year group, however due to the vivid imagery of this being sung in a place such as an alehouse, students are able to move away from the idea that the source was made for a classroom. This lesson is perfect to set the expectations of analysing sources in a way that isn’t too intimidating as they progress through KS3 and hopefully beyond.

A place to start:

I hope this has convinced you to give Ballads more of a centre stage during your source lessons – from my experience it gives students the opportunity to practise good history whilst enjoying themselves with a unique source. If you fancy introducing an Early Modern Ballad into your lessons but are unsure where to start, I recommend searching in the English Broadside Ballad Archive. This archive has hundreds of ballads and each one a scanned version of the original, a clear typed transcript, and even a performance of the ballad being sung.

So, whilst students may still prefer the ballads of today perhaps lessons like this will give them not only a greater appreciation of source work but also the bangers of the 1600s – Fortune my Foe will be stuck in your head for days!

References:

Burn, K., Counsell, C., Foster, R., McConnell, T., 2019. ‘What’s the wisdom on… Evidence and Sources’. Teaching History, 176, pp.22-25.

McAleavy, T., 1998. ‘The use of sources in school history 1910-1998: A critical perspective’. Teaching History, 91, pp.10-16.

Riley, C., 1999. ‘Evidential understanding, period knowledge and the development of literacy: a practical approach to ‘layers of inference’ for KS3’. Teaching History, 97, pp. 6-12.

English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/