'A Chancellor's Foot': Certifying Justice with Fools' Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England

In the seventeenth century, issues of jurisprudence and legal consciousness plagued pamphlets and debates at the Inns of Court. John Selden and other lawyers sought to define justice. However, while we would expect to find such debates in legal writing and pamphlets, this article demonstrates that such debates can be found in other popular genres more accessible to the public: ballads. The article uses Autolycus from The Winter's Tale as a case study to show how later Royalists balladeers and songwriters, including Alexander Brome, used the ballad genre to critique public opinion as a legitimate form of legal conscience and adjudicate the new forms of English government during the Interregnum. In doing so, the article underscores the importance of ballads for Interregnum writers and the public to counterbalance the varying legal conscience and equity in seventeenth-century England.