Peyps also created one of the great treasures of English folk history, a collection of over 1,800 broadside ballads. Broadsides are the closest thing we have to a 17th century newspaper - cheaply printed, sold in the street and fundamentally ephemeral. Browsing his collection gives a remarkable insight into the zeitgeist.

https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/pepys

Oh that pepysdiary site looks awesome, thanks for the link. I really like the font. It's amazing how awful and hard-to-take-seriously stuff more than, say, 200 years old can look with a typical web font of today. What a great job.

There is also @samuelpepys on Twitter, doing a more or less real time replay of parts of the diary.