Encyclopaedia
BALLADS
Narrative poems which may be sung, declaimed or read. Ballads in Welsh recounting events from the late 16th and early 17th centuries have survived, such as those telling of the Babington plot to kill Queen Elizabeth and of the Gunpowder Plot; but it was the arrival of the printing press in Shrewsbury in 1695, soon to be followed by presses in Wales itself, that led to the great period of Welsh ballads. This extended from the beginning of the 18th century to the death of the last of the well-known balladeers, Abel Jones (Y Bardd Crwst; 1829-1901). He and his predecessors - figures such as Elis Roberts, Twm o’r Nant (Thomas Edwards; 1739-1810) and Dic Dywyll (Richard Williams; c. 1805-c1865) - tramped the country, hawking their ballad sheets in markets, fairs and wherever people gathered. Although most of their ballads were of a religious and moralistic nature, they encompassed the whole gamut of contemporary life - colliery disasters, shipwrecks, murders, strikes - and were much prized for their news value. English-language ballads were few, but near the end of the 19th century bilingual versions increasingly appeared, especially in industrial parts of the south. The modern literary ballads of Cynan (Albert Evans-Jones), I.D. Hooson and others are not of this tradition, but rather draw their inspiration from the works of English exponents of the form.
