Table of Contents

Introduction 1 The Medieval Background 2 Songs of the Dispossessed: Eighteenth-Century Irish Song-Poetry 3 ‘Éirigh i do Sheasamh’: Oral and Literary Aspects of the Irish Lament Tradition 4 ‘For Want of Education’: The Songs of the Hedge Schoolmaster 5 The Eighteenth-Century Printed Ballad in Ireland 6 The Eighteenth-Century Irish Ballad and Modern Oral Tradition