London's best-known ballad writer at the end of the sixteenth century, Thomas Deloney was also a silk weaver and the writer of four fictions featuring artisan and merchant heroes. Two volumes of his collected ballads were published, one of them certainly in Deloney's lifetime. At least two of his prose fictions provided plots for contemporary plays, of which only Thomas Dekker's Shoemakers' Holiday (1599) survives. The ballad books and fictions were reprinted frequently throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Early editions were read out of existence; the earliest surviving copy of Jack of Newbury, for example, is dated 1619 and claims to be the eighth edition.

Aside from the record of his publications and contemporary references to his occupation as a silk weaver and his status as a ballad writer, very little is known about Deloney's life. The baptism of a son is recorded in the parish register...