The Rich Merchant Man, or, What the Punishment of Greed Sounded Like in Early Modern English Ballads

This paper explores how the ballad melody of the ‘Rich Merchant Man’ was fundamentally linked to a drive to educate the serving classes of seventeenth-century England in the appropriate expectations of the ever-growing merchant class, via a negative model of punitive retribution that stressed the need to be charitable and to shun greed for material wealth. In so doing, it offers a case-study of the multi-media methods by which this moral lesson of frugality and even charity – so seemingly contradictory for a merchant class that defined itself by the accumulation of wealth – could be inculcated in the youth it was attempting to train.