Una McIlvenna, "Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of new Books Network. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Unau Mickelvena about a book that she published with Oxford University Press in 2022. The book is called "As Singing the News of Death, Execution Ballots in Europe 1500-1900". Unau Mickelvena is honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University, Literary and Culture historian of early money in Europe. She's also the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catering, D.C. or Medici, or Hobam, not Mr. Nal Singh. She has held positions at the University of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London. Unau, welcome to new Books Network. Thank you for having me. Before we start the interview, can you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your field of expertise and also how the idea of this book came to you? So I trained as an early modern literary and cultural historian. I looked initially from my doctorate at the satirical verse that attacked the French court at the 16th century. I had come from a background in the literature so that I could see how important it was to understand the literary women in which the court was satirized and attacked. That led on to the project on execution ballads. There was a job I was going for and the topic of this post-op was early modern execution. I thought I can do something about some because I had realised at the very last minute as I was finishing my PhD that I had kind of ignored the fact that there were songs everywhere. And I realised that this was sort of an eye-on-tack resource. So I thought I'll look at execution through the ballads that I have started to notice exits to run this. And I thought I'll do a multi-lingual project because I think it's important to do comparative work. And it just sort of grew and grew as I started doing the work. Initially it was going to be four languages that ended up being five. Initially it was going to be an early modern project. And then I realised that this was a phenomenal that went even right into the 20th century. So I couldn't stop where I normally would have stopped. So it just got bigger and bigger as it went along. And the topic is so fascinating. I might say if you knew nothing about execution ballads, I'd only read an article some time ago about gallow literature in the United States where there were all these sorts of writings, confessional writings, which were dramatised. And usually the point of view was person who was going to be executed. But can you define what an execution ballad is and how were they created? I mean who were the authors and how common or prevalent they were? Yes, so they do fall into that kind of gallows literature, especially that idea of the condemned being the voice that speaks. Execution ballads are songs that tell the news of crime and their punishments, high global crimes because these are punishments that are fatal. You know, that's the death penalty. So that is a limited group of crimes, right? They were produced from the beginning of print. We have execution ballads. It's important to understand that in the early modern period, particularly because you have very low literacy rates, that the news is very likely to be sung. It will be put into song form at some. And that is a great way of disseminating information for a largely illiterate populace. People could hear a song. They can remember it because it's very likely set to a familiar tune that technique of counterfactum is something we find all over Europe. And so it's set to a familiar tune. So as soon as you have the words, you can say, "A long that helps you to memorize the song." And so songs as news media are really common. And crime and punishment is like today, one of the main categories of news always has been. So these are high proof of our crimes and they're usually quite ghastly punishments. They are very often in the first person voice of the condemned criminal. They focus on the condemned criminal rather than on as we might expect today, the victims. We don't hear so much about the victims. It's much more about the spiritual journey that the condemned criminal goes on because central to the message of almost every execution ballad is that you should learn from this lesson. The execution is more or less designed to teach all of us how to avoid sin and avoid crime. And we should see from this terrible example of this person who was just a regular person who fell into sin and crime and ended up doing terrible things and now they're about to die in front of us. We should think, "Oh my God, I must learn to be a good person to sing my prayers and behave well." I can avoid this terrible, shameful end. And do we know who the authors were? Were they just random people? Well, the most common author is our best selling early modern author, anonymous because they're mostly anonymous. Much like a lot of literature in the early modern period, the people who are making the money from ballads are the printers. So they are commissioning these ballads. And we're very sure that the lots of different kinds of people are writing ballads on a regular basis. We do know some ballad writers, but there's no standard model of what that person looks like. Some of them become somewhat of a celebrity and they have all kinds of jobs from a pub landlord to a clergyman to, you know, a noble bit, everything in between, right? So there's no standard ballad composer. A lot of people are doing it just to make a bit of cash. It's not a lucrative business because the people who are really making the money are the printers who commission them and then sell them wholesale to ballad vendors who are street singers who go out on the street. They also live a very sort of, have some of our existence trying to sell these ballads by performing some of it on the streets and people gather around in a, around this singer and buy the sheets or the little pamphlets that they have for sale. So they're cheaply printed and they're sold wholesale to ballads sellers who then they usually cost about a penny. So they're very cheap and they're cheaply printed. And earlier you mentioned Controfactum. Curious, you know, what is the tradition of Controfactum? What was the significance of the choice of music in conveying the information through these ballads, information about the nature of crimes or where the criminal was executed? So Controfactum is a very widespread technique, very awlwag, and we find it all over the world. It's very simply setting lyrics to a familiar tune. So the idea is that you pick a melody, the people know and you set words to it. The thing is though, as we all do, we carry associations with certain melodies and that those associations and emotional and cultural associations feed into the new version. So it is really important which melody the composer can choose. So they could sometimes pick very somber melodies. A very good example is the one called Fortune by Foe in English, which is by far the best selling melody for songs of disasters and executions and terrible things in early modern, rather in Europe. And it's very somber and slow. And that makes sense because most executions of ballads are fairly contemplative. They're asking you to think very people about how life can go wrong and the citizens of people commit. On the other hand, if you really don't like the person who's being executed, they for example, they're a heretic or a traitor. You might say that you're lyrics to a very fun melody where you're laughing at this person because you're so glad that they've been executed. And so we do have one like that in English called Roe Welley Mariners. And it's a very popular song, but it's actually like a country line dance song. So there's actually, we still have the steps to it where you, you know, doxido, your partner and you clap hands and you dance around and skip around. And to set a ballad composer in the 16th century did, he set the execution ballad of a heretic, Catholic heretic in England to that song, to that tune. And therefore, the song becomes this hilariously, you know, locking ridicule kind of song about a person that everyone is really glad to see the end all. So it very much depends. The counter-factum is a really sophisticated technique that carries on right through well into the 20th century. We still do it today, in fact. And so it's really quite important. that we understand, not just the lyrics, but also the melodies which they're set. Another part of the book that I was really interested in was the whole idea of execution being a public spectacle. An important aspect of that is about the idea of creating shame. You mentioned that these songs, these ballots, did play a role in constructing that feeling of shame, which sometimes even had consequences for their relatives of the person who was executed. Could you please talk about that a little for our listeners? Yeah, for sure, because that's such an important and for me, it first very puzzling part of understanding execution. Because shame was being constantly mentioned, even by the condemned prisoners, they would say, "I'm so worried about the shame my execution will cause us." And that didn't make any sense to me because I thought, "Well, if you're just about to die any minute from now, you'd be scared, sure, you'd be scared of the pain, you'd be scared of dying." But why would you be scared of shame because you're about to get? And that's because we tend to think in our modern western culture of shame as an inherently personal thing that something I do, and people will look at me and think badly of me. But what we have to understand about how shame works in the early modern period is that it is something that is held by one's family, one's kin network. And so it's very much to do with honor, did honor. And your family will be disalered by something that any member of the family does to it. So really, we have to think about when a condemned criminal is scared of the shame, it will cause the. They're worried about the shame, it'll cause their remaining family members. So this is about stigma that will happen to those people. They will be thrown out of the guild. They will be ostracized in public. They will lose jobs because of the way that their relative was executed. And that's another really important part of it is that it's very much to do with the particular method of execution, because each method, and there was a whole range of methods from hanging to be heading to boiling to burying, that each one of them had a specific degree of dishonor. And so what you want is that your relative gets executed in the least dishonorable way possible. So it's more than just being a she of the fact that, say for example, you're a relative murdered someone. That doesn't come into it as much. It's much more about the method by which they're executed. And so you get families petitioning the authorities to say, you know, they're not asking for their relative to be pardoned and, you know, to be acquitted of the crime. They say, no, no, no, no, we know you're going to execute it. Could you maybe perhaps that instead of hanging them, or could you hang them instead of burning them because each one of those is a, you know, they're more or less dishonorable than the next. And so when high this effects execution ballots is that you find the mention of shame, not in the soul where they're talking about the crime, which is where we would expect it. We say the shameful murder or the shameful action. Instead we find the mention of shame right at the end of the song when the person is being executed. They talk about this shameful and I will die. It's all about how I'm leaving this world. And a lot of that has to do with the publicity of the execution spectacle that the public knowledge of what this person has done in the way in which they were executed is visible for everyone to see. And so the family who's left behind is, you know, made to suffer the consequences of that. So all punishment in the early modern period is about publicity. Even if you're not being executed, you're being whipped, for example, or branded. It's very much about the publicity, the public knowledge of what you have done must be witnessed by the community. And that's where she and a farmer come into it. So it's really complex and very, very different to how we conceive of punishment in our modern Western society. So it took me a long time to work all of that out. But really, the publicity is central to understanding how this crime is kind of expiated from the community. You have to be witness to the country. And that reminds me of some unfortunate practices even in today's contemporary world where there's public, there's still in some countries public execution or public flagging up people, you know, have committed a small crime. Let's see, it happens in a whole audience to, is this idea of shame to make them ashamed of the crime they have committed? Yeah, so there are, those cases where public execution is still carried on today, they would have the very similar understanding to early modern Europeans of how disorder works and that public witnessing of the crime. There are also underneath in those cases that it works as a deterrent that if people witness this terrible thing happening, they won't commit crimes. We know that, you know, just statistically speaking, that isn't true. If someone is going to murder someone, they're going to murder them better what punishment it is. And so deterrent, deterrent isn't really an argument. Some people still think it is, but it doesn't hold any way it really. But it's very much about public witnessing and the dishonor that goes with that. And there was this medieval tradition, I guess, some criminals were put on the back of a horse or a donkey and there was this group of people singing or musicians playing music. Again, it was the whole idea of public shaming them. Yeah, that's also another kind of ritual. Now, I'd be very, I'm always very quick to remind people that this is not something we associate or we should not associate with the medieval. This is very much René Talks. All of these public punishments are very much. We have this weird cultural idea that the middle ages were some barbaric time full of crumulties. But in fact, that's the René thoughts. You really get these public spectacles, big scaffolds, thousands of people watching. That's from the sort of 16th century onwards. So, but the thing you're talking about, for example, the public profession that is about shaming someone in public in front of the community. Very often they are extra legal community rituals, so they're not necessarily decided by a court, although it could be. But the community very often will take matters into their own hands. It's usually to do with sexual conformity. So if somebody is believed by the community to not be conforming to the norms of marital and sexual behavior, you'll find that the community will take action. And these kinds of processions are often, they're known by a lot of different names. Shari Vari in French, thus Habathesbibin in German. In English, they're known as rough music or skimmington rides. There's a lot of different terms, but very often the community will gather and make lots of terrible noise with home made instruments, banging pots and pans and weaving anything that makes a lot of noise in order to make really discordant music. And that discordant music is supposed to reflect the discord that these people have brought into the community by not conforming. So women that are believed to be schools or believed to be sort of public nuisance are often treated to this kind of extra legal punishment. But the shame is very much a part of it that you are shamed into conforming to the way people expect, which is heterosexual marriage or people, roughly the same age, and you produce children from it. Any deviation from that is seen as not conforming. So that's when it would happen. And I also have a question about gender and shame, but I'd rather wait until a few more minutes, I have another question, which is about the general of the criminal, the personal was executed. So before that, I'd like to talk about chapter three. And I really love the title of the chapter, Fake News, How Execution Ballots Walked The Line Between Truth and Fiction. And what I found really fascinating and surprising to me was that there were a lot of supernatural elements in these ballots, but they made them more plausible rather than rather than making people kind of question the content or the narrative of these ballots. So question that I have is the why is it that those supernatural elements, first of all, made them plausible and how accurate these ballots were in narrating the details of the crime? again that's another thing that's kind of hard for us to accept. When we see moments in these ballots where something supernatural or magical happens, we immediately assume, "Oh, well, that means it's not true." But for an early modern audience who believed that God was acting in our everyday lives, constantly sending us signs and portions of his justice or his beliefs, those supernatural events were interpreted as God telling us what to do. So, for example, the very famous one is, of course, Lady Macbeth, when the blood will wash out of her hands. That kind of trope of a murderer being unable to get the blood away off their skin is accepted in the early modern period as proof that this is the murderer. And in fact, for centuries, it's believed that the murderer was brought into the presence of the corpse. The corpse would automatically, it's spontaneously start bleeding. And that's a process called "cruentation." There was a name for it. And so people believed this right into the 19th century, that this was what would happen. So those kinds of things that we now discount as magical or superstitious. For early modern people, they were evidence of God working in the world. And so they actually gave more. They made the ballots more trustworthy because there it is. That's the proof. So we have to really sort of enter into the mind of an early modern person who was hearing this song. And think, "Okay, actually, the mention of werewolves for us makes us laugh, but actually for them, people who really believe that werewolves were a thing, that's something to be scared about. You know, that's real. You still have wolves in the 16th century, Europe, wolves in the forests. So werewolves were a much more believable kind of entity." So the other thing that makes it difficult as well, though, by contrast, is the fact that valid singers are notoriously reputed in the early modern period as they not trustworthy. They're there to sell you their songs. And they'll. they love the traumatic, right? So many of these songs are very sensationalists in their language because you're trying to sell it on the street, along with a bunch of other people who are trying to sell their stuff. So you have to make it a song that's going to be. That's going to capture the public's imagination and make them stop while they're shopping in the marketplace and listen to the singer. And so they're full of these kind of fantastical details at times, which is a way of getting the people to listen. And so because of that, people are just as. you know, I think we have just with many gullible people and skeptical people in our society today as we did then. And so there are people who think, "Yeah, that valid singer is not to be trusted." And it's so bad that in fact in Britain, valid singers are so reputed to be involved in pickpocketing. That their testimony in court is immediately discredited. If somebody gets out and identifies as a valid singer, they say, "Oh, well, they're not to be trusted." Because they're so. associated with criminality. Because as you can imagine, you've got a group of people standing around listening in a very distracted way to a valid singer. Well, that's the perfect time for someone to come along and cut your personal and steal your money. And so that does happen a lot with the Helen singers. And so they are a group of people who are already associated with a lack of trust and a lack of honesty. And so when they then think they're thongs, there is that kind of sense of disbelief going on at the same time. So it's a very, very difficult question to answer. How true were they? I would say they're just as true as any other account. The fact that they are in soul form doesn't make them any less reliable than any other account of an event. And it's a tough one. Yeah, yeah. And what was the role of Protestant reformation in, let's say, increasing the popularity of these songs or their frequency? And also the infamous witch hunts. Okay, so there's a lot going on there. I mean, one of the things that the Protestant reformation does. And one of the way the reasons the reformation happens in the way it does, particularly the Lutheran reformation is because Martin Luther understood the pyre or a song. And so what he did was he encouraged followers to sing him simple folk hymns called corals in church in their old language. And a big thing about the Protestant reformation is of course the translation of the Bible and other sacred texts into the vernacular language and the local people so that we can all read the Bible ourselves, rather than relying on a priest to do it for us. And so that was something that Luther really championed. So he took melody that people already knew. So he's using comfort back then and he gets these hymns written that are very simple and there's hundreds and hundreds of them and that people love it. And so you get people singing in church, something that we probably take for granted nowadays, but that was it, that was a really normal thing. And the Catholics are doing it, the Catholics are freaking out about it because you know, they're not supposed to be singing in their old language in church. That's for the choir and the priest to sing in Latin. So you've got this huge kind of the nolan on all people singing solgs in the vernacular that are used counter fact in. The other thing of course that the reformation does is it introduces extraordinary upheaval. I mean, I would I would argue that the reformation is the single most important event of the the last millennium in terms of the upheaval it caused for Europe. People then are you know, you've got wars going on all over the place. You've got the 30 years war which breaks out in the early 17th century, which really is like a world war to Europeans who don't understand much about the rest of the world. Everyone is fighting. There's famine and destruction. And so people look for skate goats, come on to blame for this. And that's it. For me, there's no accident that the huge which panics that start particularly in the German lands. And that spread across Europe are for me absolutely linked to the the reformation and the upheaval that it caused. So we get which hunting going on in different ways and different things. It's very important to understand that in the German lands, men, women and children are being you know denounced on mass and huge executions huge bonfires of people are going on. You get a different modeling in Britain, for example, where you get you tend to get a focus on women and particularly older women. But the the same thing is going on there are ballots being produced about about which executions are the difference of course is that the German ones are just in the time of very, very, very, there were you know hundreds of people executed and it was so awful. I have to kind of real off a whole list of the terrible things that happened. Whereas the one's in the English language tend to be about very specific identifiable women. But it certainly it's it's as much of a crime murder or anything else. And so it features very common of a for a certain time period. Obviously we don't get them anymore in the 19th century. We don't get any more execution ballots or witches. And the question that I wanted to ask earlier, which was about the shame and gender. So what elements of crime influence the way this stories or the content, the ballots were exaggerated in a way. Did it have anything to do with the gender of the criminal or the gravity of the crime? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Just like today, crimes by women are very much overrepresented in execution ballots. When we look at the statistics of how many women are actually committing crimes, particularly violent crimes. We can very quickly see that they they are far more represented in execution ballots than they should be. There is in fact, we can do a sort of a fashion in fact in the early 17th century for stories about whites murdering their husbands in England. And you get this kind of flurry of ballots about this and you know, wives are all these become these ballots become a kind of message to all whites to learn from this horrible example of these terrible women. You know, what in fact real we can see quite clearly that it's far more likely that a husband peel his wife than the other way around at the time. So what's interesting about the way the law works in the early moment period is that a man is actually much more likely to get off on an accusation of murder by claiming it was in the heat of the moment it was in a fight. I was drunk. We had a fight and therefore it becomes man slaughter. But women couldn't generally ask for man slaughter to have their conviction reduced to man slaughter because they didn't go to taverns. They didn't carry tools that they could accidentally kind of kill their friend with. Instead the women will nearly always be convicted because even if the judges are aware that there's a history of domestic violence and that this woman is potentially defending herself from a violent husband that won't change anything. She's murdered her husband and so therefore that you know she will she'll burn for it. The difference way what we have in in written and in France is something called petty treason which is when a social inferior murders their social superior. So when a servant murders their master or mistress or when a wife murders her husband he's thought of as her lord and therefore it's like a small kind of treason. It's like us murdering the king or you know lord a master a wife murdering their husband is like this will treason so petty putty treason it's called petty treason in England and therefore she will burn for it. Anyone who does commits petty treason is burned. The things to understand about the you know the latent injustice of all of this is that execution ballots always always are unquestioning of the justice. The the person who is condemned is always guilty. The justice is unquestioned. They go to their execution remorseful repentant make they don't fight against it. They don't there's no execution ballot that mentions a botched-up execution or somebody struggling on the scaffold nothing like that because these ballots always present an image justice as be executed faultlessly and that's really important to understand so you can introduce any any kind of even doubt that perhaps maybe this person wasn't quite fully guilty you know that never ever happens and and so these are they exist to teach a moral lesson and so any doubt would dilute that let dilute that lesson so they're that's really important to understand about them. And so if they never questioned the idea of justice but were they the contents of this bias were they were sympathetic towards the criminals or the person people were going to be hanged or they were simply critical of them. It's it's an interesting I wouldn't I wouldn't set necessary go bars to think simply except that we are supposed to be compassionate. That's the emotion that most execution ballots are encouraging in their listeners and compassion is a real sense of you know empathy that you yourself the listener will you're also a sinner and therefore if you you know find yourself you know moving away from God you could yourself be open to temptation by the devil just like this person laws and so none of us shouldn't be too confident that will never this will never happen to us and that's the message that you're always getting and so the remorse and repentance that the condemned criminal sings of as they sing to this sort of imagined spectator who's at the execution is supposed to encourage in us a sense that you know I am I've done the wrong thing or I could do the wrong thing and I should never get too cocky or arrogant about my perfection because this is something that could happen to me at any moment. The other question that I have is about the execution of the nobility or political crimes and that's something you discuss in the book. How would those executions treated in these songs and if there was a monarch was being executed whether any that's a nationalistic epituratic feelings or sentiments reflected in the songs? Yeah that's a really good question because we have to understand that the nobility are thought of us completely different to regular humans right so they get a different kind of execution for a start they will always be beheaded unless they've done something just unthinkable but they are always beheaded which is the most or I should say the least dishonorable method and across all of Europe they will be beheaded the sword which itself kind of associated with chivalry you know it's only in Britain that no that ability is executed with an axe. I have a rouse it's a sword. So the the ballots about new ability are better that get executed are really interesting because they're nearly always executed for political reasons right you know they're treason or a sense they've angered the monarch right if you think of Sir Walter Raleigh or the urban Essex and people like that so the thing is these are heroes particularly someone like the Earl of Essex someone that the people adore because he's this great military hero and then the next thing you know he's being executed now you cannot question the monarch's decision that's treason in itself right so how you write a ballot that is both yes it's good that he's being executed but oh gosh we really miss him I mean that becomes a very difficult thing to do but yet ballot composers do it they walk this very fine line between he's a wonderful he was a wonderful hero but he deserved to die so they're very different to other kinds of ballots they're very sympathetic so execution ballots about the nobility are all as without exception sympathetic to the noble person so the ones you get in Italian for example they're always you know I've got ones for example it's a good example we're talking about the difference with gender I've got some Italian ones where a noble woman has murdered her husband but because she is singing the ballot herself she becomes incredibly sympathetic character who's very beautiful and she only she doesn't say anything exclusively about the murder or her own execution it's all just kind of poetic trope sub out you know white skin and red blood and it's very noble that romantic so there's an absolutely completely different treatment of nobility in execution ballots for sure you asked about kings and queens and of course we have quite a few of those being executed the very obvious ones are Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France along with his wife Manuel Twanette that's a really interesting example Charles the first I mean everyone a Europe is a poll that the English are executing a king they can't believe it and so kind of unsurprisingly the the the ballots in all the other languages besides English are quite sympathetic to him and two of his his no widow Henry Henry S. Maria and he's pictured as this loving king and they've taken him away from his wife and children you you would expect however though that in England where it is illegal to question the regicide you know they they make it an illegal thing to do to write songs in support of the deny murdered king they're all her there are lots of ballots in fact that say what what happened this should never have happened this was the worst thing in the world we should never have murdered our king so there's actually that really surprised me when I discovered how many ballots were in existence that were it took a very strong royalist bent the other than example is Louis XVI and Mariel Twanette now they are all in favor of all the executions of or you know I shouldn't say they all are most are in favor of the executions of these two monarchs however the difference between the ones about Louis and the ones that Mariel Twanette he is pictured as a generally a foolish a childlike king who was sort of duped into doing these bad things and there's actually there's some sols where that really are very and mournful at the loss of their their good father you know there's one where you know his he sinks to his children and his children sing to him and that's quite a sympathetic depiction there are no sols whatsoever that are in take that are sympathetic to Mariel Twanette she is described as a Tigris a devil the evil incarnate she they celebrate it for a day with a viciousness and a vitriolic kind of content that is breathtaking. The difference between them, the depiction of these two monarchs in song is, it really is outrageous. The misogyny that feeds the songs about executed queens is so obvious, even though you know, the Lumi and Mahi El Tvnet were executed only a few months apart. It's like it's like two different events altogether. It's just, it's really extraordinary, how much misogyny is vitriol is directed at the queen as opposed to her husband. What about the songs in romanticizing the execution of an outlaw? We know we have, I think in the romantic literature, we also had this idea of romanticizing an outlaw or a highway man. It kind of lingers even in 20th century, especially in American culture, maybe, where we always have these ballads or songs about some criminals or not necessarily criminals people who out of poverty committed some crimes but also gave to the poor. So what was the role of these songs in romanticizing the idea of a villain or an outlaw? Yeah, there's a whole, it's all kind of some genre of balladry is overbacked and you know, some of the oldest songs we have in English, for example, are about Robin Hood. Yeah. And they keep up that idea that he stole from the rich and he gave to the poor. Now that never ever happened, no outlaw ever did that. And if I get right, there are still in fact, Nakhokorida, a song about in Mexico and in Central America about drug barons that pre-ease them as these wonderful guys. So it is definitely the longest and worst enduring tradition within balladry, I'd say. But what I did covered as I looked at ballads across time, there was a model of two very distinct models of ballads about outlaws. There was what I call the romantic and then the realistic. The romantic ones are the ones that in fact, we're often still singing today. They are the kinds about the Robin Hood style. And in every language it seems that you can have these songs where this kind of this bloke, his kind of charming, who nothing to do to anything really terribly bad. And in those songs, his execution is only very kind of obliquely referred to. We don't really spend much time on the realistic depiction on execution. What's interesting is that as I really amassed a kind of large corpus of ballads, you got to see that certain melodies were used again and again for execution balance. The romantic ones do not use traditional execution melodies. And that was another big kind of sign to me that I was looking at something like a very different thing altogether. By contrast, the realistic model, they were always composed directly upon the execution so I could date the printing to very close to the time of the actual execution. They were very realistic in terms of the depiction of the execution itself. The Ive Mall was portrayed as an evil villain who terrorized the countryside and for him there was no sympathy whatsoever. And they were sent to traditional execution-balanced melodies. And so for me, this sort of nostalgic romantic model differs so extraordinarily from this other realistic model. To me, they are completely different things. But interestingly, it is the nostalgic ones that we are still singing that have kind of entered folk song or nursery rhyme territory and are still sung today. And they also continue. This whole tradition also considered in 20th century, but of course, it started to decline. A part of the reason is that we had fewer public executions. But in general, what happened to these ballots? And do you personally know of any region in Europe or any other parts of the wood where this tradition is still lying? So when I actually sort of ran the statistics on how many ballots existed in certain periods, I noticed in almost every language a very sharp drop off at a certain time. And I traced that to the exact moment when public executions stopped happening. And executions were instead moved inside the prison walls. So executions continue. But the public doesn't get to gather on mass in their thousands to witness these. And precisely at that moment, you see a sharp drop off in the numbers of ballots being composed about them, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. There's some direct correlation between the idea that this is a public event and the need to write a song about it. The only ones that remain after that period tend to be for crimes that are really nefarious, you know, will be like, for example, and doesn't just cut up. He doesn't just murder his wife. He cuts up into a bunch of pieces or something or he murders a tiny child. So that's, we definitely see us a very sharp drop off in execution ballots. One of the interesting things that we see though is in Britain, for example, we start to, instead of executing criminals, we start to transport them to Australia, mostly. And you start to see this rise in what are called transportation ballots. And they become really, really popular. What's interesting is that in Britain, the printing community is based in a certain area of London, known as seven dials. And there's a huge Irish population there. They're very moldy, the composing in the printing and the selling of ballots. And so there's lots of songs about the Irish in London during this period. The Irish are very overrepresented in terms of the population who is transported to Australia. And so this becomes a really popular sort of new genre or new topic for ballots. And so you could say that the punishment ballot continues, but in a different form, because we're not publicly executing people anymore, but we are still transporting them. So lots of Irish folk songs that are still popular today talk about places like Botany Bay and Van Dieben's Land, which were the big penal colonies in the very early days of Australia. So I would say that that kind of continues in that sense. And those are seen as actually kind of nostalgic ballots, not for Australians, but Lena. And before we end this conversation, I always ask people that I answer you if they have any other projects they're currently working on, any books that might expect some time soon. Yeah, I'm thrilled. I've actually just been awarded a major fellowship in research council to study ballots as news media in Europe and Australia. And this is going to take a very similar model to this project that I'm just completed, but expand it to news ballots on all kinds of news topics. So I can look at politics and political satire, military conflicts, and natural disasters and wonders as well as crime and punishment. And I'm super excited. I'm just about to start that really major project. And I'm working currently on a project on disaster ballots. So shipwrecks, fires, floods, earthquakes, you name it, there was songs about it from the from the dawn of printed onwards. Yeah, and I guess they're also very coming in Australia with bushfires as well. Yeah, so I mean, there are, for example, a load of songs about 9/11. Is an entire Wikipedia page just odd songs that people wrote after 9/11. So while we don't use song as a primary media and all communicating news today, we still use it as a way of expressing emotion about terrible events, whatever they may be, mining disasters or shipwrecks or terrorist attacks. By anything, well, I hope to be able to talk to you about your new book, but I guess it might be a couple of years before it's published. It'll take me some time. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about your fascinating book. And I strongly urge our listeners to read the book. It's like, that's the topic that I didn't really think would interest me, but when I started browsing through the book, I just started reading and it was fascinating. And you have included a lot of these ballots in your book as well. Yes, there's some musical scores. We've got we have the tunes for a lot of them still. So and I'd also have recording on my website, which is executionviolets.com. Right. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks more, David. It's a pleasure.