The Ballad of Reading Gaol The Ballad of Reading Gaol The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol () on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison. During his imprisonment, on Tuesday, 7 July 1896, a hanging took place. Charles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was
The Ballad of Chevy Chase and in it the ballad is called "The Hunting of Cheviot", while the first manuscript version of the ballad was written ca. 1550 (MS Ashmole 48, Bodleian Library). In the seventeenth century, the tune was licensed in 1624 and again in 1675. Sir Philip Sidney said of this early ballad: In 1711 Joseph Addison wrote in "The Spectator", The old song of "Chevy-Chase" is the favourite ballad of the common people of England, and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in his discourse of