Come Lasses and Lads

This musical score represents the broadside tradition of satirical song—a staple of English popular culture from the 1600s onward. The tune, notated in treble clef with two sharps, accompanied verse that mocked social types, political figures, or current events. Such songs were printed cheaply on single sheets, sung in taverns and streets, and spread criticism beyond the reach of the elite. The broadside merged music, text, and often crude woodcut images into a portable medium of humor and protest. This practice established conventions later inherited by Victorian comic weeklies and twentieth-century comic strips: serial imagery, accessible humor, and the marriage of visual and verbal satire aimed at ordinary readers.