This book falls into two parts. The first centres on Richard Sheale, harper of Tamworth, peddler and minstrel for the Stanley family, and the two sides of his career. On the one hand, I argue that Sheale worked for the London ballad market and that he owned Bodleian MS Ashmole 48, a plain paper volume copied by several hands that is largely devoted to songs and ballads, many of them first printed at about the same time the manuscript was copied. On the other hand, I argue that Sheale also performed the role of a traditional praise-singer for the Stanleys, attending the English lords at Berwick in 1558 during the last great border campaign and composing a long piece of family encomium, The Stanley Poem, which has previously been attributed to bishop Thomas Stanley.

How best to refer to this second part of Sheale's career poses something of a problem. The term ‘praise-singer’ is one that Sheale himself would scarcely have recognized; it was never used in medieval or early modern England. When Edmund Spenser referred to the Irish praise-singers of his day he used the Celtic word ‘bard’, but he described these bards flourishing in an uncivilized society in which poets were admired, feared and rewarded beyond the hopes of any English poet or musician. Had Sheale lived a century earlier, we might still use the standard medieval equivalent, gestour, that is, one who sings of the gesta or deeds of worthy men, but by Sheale's day the gestour had been transmuted into the modern ‘jester’, evoking the less dignified (but no less ancient) side of the minstrel's art.