5. The ballad's illustrations

Most editions of the Chronicle include woodcut illustrations portraying the monarchs and occasionally their consorts.[1] For A.2, the sequence of illustrations corresponds with the narrative of the text: it begins with a portrait of William I and concludes with Charles I and Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV of France, printed in two woodblock rows. While as has been seen the C editions update their text to the present, the existing blocks are recycled without the addition of an illustration of the current monarch, Charles II. Whether from economy or piety towards the living king's countenance, the omission of the reigning monarch was to become an occasional tradition within the Chronicle's publishing history.[2]

The recycling of blocks can be useful to the historian of the Chronicle and other printed texts. Tracking the recurrence of woodblocks (or other printing materials such as ornaments, rules or pieces of type) can reveal printers, uncover forgeries and help date editions.[3] Bibliographers have long employed similar technical aids to identify common blocks, using strobes, stereoscopic arrangements of mirrors, or the overlaying of transparencies on film or on screen.[4] Recently, systems employing digital image-recognition have been developed: these include the University of Oxford's ImageMatch tool, commissioned to assist in the study of the woodcuts of The Wandering Jew's Chronicle and other ballads.[5]

Fig.10. Content-based image-recognition of ballad woodcuts: the Bodleian Library's ImageMatch tool.

The Illustrations tab of the edition that this paper accompanies has a feature for comparing woodcuts: by layering and adjusting the transparency, users can readily see if the same block or a copy was used.

Fig. 11. The Illustrations section's variable opacity feature shown with images of two printings from the same block overlaid.

All of these technical aids are necessarily used in combination with a knowledge of printing. There are many circumstances that can influence how a block is printed, such as condition of the impression and the condition of the block, which may also be copied more closely than either human or computer vision can readily distinguish. Deterioration or other distinctive features of the block can help: cracks and chips to blocks, and the appearance of wormholes made by burrowing insects which show up as white circles within the impressions, are particularly useful in identifying a reused block, as is shown by their appearance in the second of these two Chronicle woodcuts, and their recurrence in the latter two.[6]

Fig. 12. four images of Henry II from successive editions of the ballad, each printed from the same woodblock.

Ballad woodblocks of the period were used to destruction, often appearing on multiple ballads, but the Chronicle blocks seem to have been reserved almost exclusively as accompaniments to this particular ballad, perhaps due to their size or their close association with the text. The one exception I am aware of is a ballad dated 1650, A Watch for a Wise-mans observation, on which the bottom row of the A-C edition blocks is awkwardly placed: evidently in better condition here than it was when used on Francis Grove's A.2 edition, it indicates a publication date for A.2 around the registration date of 1656.[7]

While all the C-editions employ these same blocks (absenting the image of Henry V, which seems to have broken off the end of its block before C.1 was printed)[8] subsequent editions adopt either copies or new versions.

Fig. 13. Five views of Henry II from various later editions of the ballad.

Fig. 14. Two late views of Henry II.

One edition (H.3) lacks any illustrations, while two editions (H.4 and I.1) are illustrated with single woodcuts of monarchs.[9] A distinctive visual genealogy, made up of the descent of the ballad's bibliographical elements (the blocks, which confirm the order of publishing indicated by the imprints) and iconographic elements (the subject of those blocks) can therefore be added to the publication timeline.