Humour, Wit, & Satire of the Seventeenth Century — Reading Notes

The Refrain of Exposure

The ballad 'I know what I know' (published 1620) uses a repeated tagline to undercut every claim to virtue. Each stanza presents a type—the climber, the fox, the devout pretender—and ends with the same withheld knowledge. This structural choice creates a rhythm of accusation without direct confrontation, as if the speaker is winking at the audience. The refrain 'but I know &c.' leaves the specifics to the listener's imagination, turning the song into a shared code of suspicion. Ashton's inclusion of the printer's attribution ('Assignes of Thomas Symcocke') grounds the piece in the commercial print trade, where such ballads were sold for a penny.

Economies of Greed and Guile

Several excerpts dwell on money and its abuses. The usurer who 'idly live[s] upon his moneys Lone' and the rich tradesman who cheats 'in Weight and Measure' are paired with the gallant who never pays his tailor. The miser in 'A Proper Gentlewoman' offers a glass of wine so small it becomes a joke about scale—'two Taylors thimbles'—and then 'kist it to save cost.' These details point to a society obsessed with credit, debt, and the performance of wealth. Ashton's own scholarly work on eighteenth-century chap-books suggests a long-standing interest in how cheap print reflected economic anxieties.

Theatricality and Disguise

Disguise is a recurring motif: Papists attend church 'once a moneth' to save fines, women appear 'modest in show' like Lucretia, and 'Rorers' boast of wars they never fought. The ballad's final warning—'all is not Gold that doth glister in show'—sums up a world where surfaces are routinely deceptive. Even the compiler's role is theatrical: Ashton curates these voices without moralizing, letting the texts perform their own unmasking. The collection thus becomes a stage where seventeenth-century readers could recognize their neighbors—and themselves—in the rogues' gallery.

Ashton's anthology rewards readers who attend to the interplay between text and context. The ballads and anecdotes are best approached as artifacts of a print culture that thrived on shared references and inside jokes. Pay attention to the printers' names and dates, which anchor each piece in a specific moment of production. The collection does not offer a single narrative but a mosaic of voices, each vying for the last word on human folly.

Leafing through John Ashton’s collection, I kept noticing how often the old satirists dressed up their complaints in borrowed clothes—a friar’s robe, a merchant’s frown. It made me remember, softly, an old friend’s copy of The Jest Book The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings — Story, Setting & Ideas, where the same sly wink hid behind every anecdote. Both feel like eavesdropping on laughter that endures.