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Afools bolt is soon shot
Pepys, i, 178, B.L., six woodcuts, four columns.
Both the proverbial title of this ballad and the fine large woodcut of Part I were borrowed from Samuel Rowlands's satiric pamphlet, A Fooles Bolt is soone shott, which was printed by George Loftus in 1614 {Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, Hunterian Club, 1880, vol. n). The ballad may have been printed by John Grismond immediately after Rowlands's book, but it was first entered in the Stationers' Register on June 20, 1629 (Arber's Transcript, iv, 216), by Francis Coles. Approaching the same subject from another angle is the much older ballad (1 569) of "The xxv. orders of Fooles" reprinted in A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads, 1867, p. 88.
The author, T.F., translated in 1616 a sensational news-pamphlet called Miraculous Newes, From the Cittie of Holdt, in the Lord-ship of Munster (in Germany) the twentieth of September last past. 1616. Where There Were Plainly beheld three dead bodyes rise out of their Graues, admonishing the people of ludgements to come (British Museum, 1103. d. 53. For a ballad on the subject see the Shirburn Ballads, pp. 76—80). He can hardly have been the T.F., a Kentishman, who in 1585 published Newes From the North. Otherwise called the Conference between Simon Certain and Pierce Plowman (C. 40. d. 12).
The tune is given in Chappell's Popular Music, 1, 378. |
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