for as little as a penny. They could also be cut in half lengthways to make 'broadslips', or folded to make chapbooks and where these contained several songs such collections were known as 'garlands'. The earliest broadsides that survive date from the early sixteenth century, but relatively few survive from before 1550. From 1556 the Stationers Company in London attempted to force registration of all ballads and some 2,000 were recorded between then and 1600, but, since they were easy to print and distribute, it is likely that far more were printed. Scholars often distinguish between the earlier blackletter broadsides, using larger heavy 'gothic' print, most common up to the middle of the seventeenth century, and lighter whiteletter, roman or italic typefaces, that were easier to read and became common thereafter. A centre of broadside production was the Seven Dials area of London. Broadsides were produced in huge numbers, with over 400,000 being sold in England annually by the 1660s, probably close to their peak of popularity. Many were sold by travelling chapmen in city streets and at fairs or by balladeers, who sang the songs printed on their broadsides in an attempt to attract customers. In Britain broadsides began to decline in popularity in the seventeenth century as initially chapbooks and later bound books and newspapers, began to replace them, until they appear to have died out in the nineteenth century. They lasted longer in Ireland, and although never produced in such huge numbers in North America, they were significant in the eighteenth century and provided an important medium of propaganda, on both sides, in the American War of Independence. Most of the knowledge of broadsides in England comes from the fact that several significant figures chose to collect them, including Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724), in what became Roxburghe Ballads. In the eighteenth century there were several printed collections, including Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20), Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and Joseph Ritson's, The Bishopric Garland (1784). In Scotland similar work was undertaken by figures including Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03). One of the largest collections was made by Sir Frederick Madden who collected some 30,000 songs now in the 'Madden Collection' in the Cambridge University Library. Contemporary broadside ballad singers are Tom Paxton,