I was just slipping down an internet wormhole on Scottish land rights poetry and song, and came across this juicy nugget:
…the impact of Sorley MacLean’s paper on ‘The Poetry of the Clearances’ – the most powerful piece of socio-political and literary criticism I have ever read
Sounds great, hey? He was a acclaimed Scottish poet, but this paper is not about his poetry but those who came before him and who wrote in Gaelic. I haven’t had a chance to read it in full yet but did a quick flick through after finding a pdf of it here. If this link goes dead then you can also find it hosted here on our website too.
Just parking this all here so I can find it when time comes to do more research on Scottish shazzle and you never know, someone else might find this useful too!
This book from 1932 is absolutely hilarious… but why, you may ask, is it featured in a blog on books connected to land rights history?
Well in the process of being bonkers and funny, it gives a really fascinating insight into the gulf between rural and urban, working poor and inherited wealth in the inter war years. This gives you a shocking and quite profound insight into just how spoilt, lothesome and entitled much of the ruling class were at the time, and judging by Boris Johnson and his pals, still are to this day. It also gives you some lovely insights into the workings of a pre mechanisation farm, in a fictionalised but similar manner to GeorgeEwart Evan’s books.
I’ve already documented my love for George’s book Where Beards Wag All, which he wrote fifteen years later and is far more concentrated on the role of the oral tradition in rural settings.
I’ve been meaning to write up about this book for ages and now I come to do so, what I learnt from it has quite slipped my mind… but just looking at the contents pages is more than enough to wet the intellectual appetite. I mean it has chapters called ‘Beer’, ‘Field Names’ and ‘Bacon and Ham Curing’ and a whole section titled ‘Various Old People’. Ha!
As climate change starts to bite and we continue looking for ways to work the land with nature rather than by fighting against her, books like this will be valuable resources indeed.
The Economist review on the inside cover just about sums it up: ‘Original, arresting and always human… The book is a mine of information, but this is offered so unpretentiously that it reads as easily as a quiet book of memoirs’
Who wouldn’t want to own and read a book with this cover and title? A fascinating and beautifully presented read documenting how quickly we did and could mobilise and train people to have meaningful work on the land when needed. Oh and that women can of course do everything that men can, often with ease and in many cases better.
My dear Granny was such a person who discovered her calling via a love of driving big vehicles around during the 2nd world war. I don’t think she ever found quite the same happiness again after she was consigned back to doing ‘women’s work’ once the men returned from fighting.
I was doing a little updating of this site recently and realised that I hadn’t posted about Nick’s remarkable book yet. Nick is a dear friend and I had the joy of arguing with him on the finer details of an early manuscript as well as accompanying him on one of the book’s trespasses. Well that is not quite true, I was on the train with him and then decided not to go along as his description of the landowner freaked me out too much to want to risk it.
If you are on this website, you’ve probably already read it, but if not, please acquire it at your soonest convenience and pause your life until you’ve had the change to drink it down.
This book is basically the spiritual companion to our show.
The wonderful singer and promoter Sophie Bostock was waxing lyrical about this book to me and I’m so glad that I bought it as soon as she recommended it to me. It is a gem. I learnt so much from this including songs such as The Cutty Wren, The Bitter Withy, and The Death of Bill Brown.
A.L. Lloyd is very thorough and includes lyrics, music and background to all manner of songs from around England and beyond going back as far as he dare go and then some.
To think what England once had been, When such poor folk, by right of birth, Claimed an inalienable share And tenure of their native earth; When even the least enjoyed the yield Of labour in the common field, And kept his pig, and grazed his cow, And gathered firewood on the waste To warm his bones in Winter. Now The hirelings of a heartless caste, Owners of factories and mills, Puffed with undigested pride, And flushed by the tax-eater’s greed, Have stolen half the countryside With their accursed Enclosure Bills; While humble folk who’ve earned the meed Of painful husbandry, despoiled Of their scant share of paradise, See high park-walls and paling rise About the land where once they toiled. Now the mantrap’s iron teeth Lurk in the woods and on the heath, And never a rabbit or a hare Sweetens the labourer’s skimpy fare- Though men with hunger-hollowed eyes Hear the grai-fed pheasant’s cries Taunting their stomachs as they gaze Disheartened on the dwindling blaze That lights their cheerless chimney-side, And shiver.
Francis Brett Young (29 June 1884 – 28 March 1954) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, composer, doctor and soldier – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Brett_Young – he wrote The Island in 1944.
We get sent, given and recommended a lot of books by people who’ve seen the show. They are nearly always very useful and often even get read. Every so often one comes along that wins. This is such a book. What a title! And full of lovely maps and considered prose too. Copies come up 2nd hand for about the £20 mark fairly often, well worth it.
Needless to say this book is a glorious source of academically thorough research into peasant struggles against the greed and tyranny of the aristocracy.
That there are algorithms out there on the internet that know so much about us all is shit scary. Some days it can be annoyingly useful though, like the day when it suggested that I might want to buy a 2nd hand copy of this book and I did… and was grateful for the recommendation. Grrrrrrrr….
The book is very geographically focussed on the north east lowlands of Scotland and explores advances in technology and the repercussions for workers through the medium of bothy ballads. Sounds ace, doesn’t it?
It covers the 1800s in detail and really helped me to understand the transition from women working the fields with a sickle, to men working the fields with scythes, and oxen pulling rudimentary ploughs, to a paid of horses pulling a far more modern device. It also explores the beginnings of automation, steam power and machines. All evidenced by songs. Brilliant.
This is a really short and enjoyable read; for us, worth the print price alone for p19’s:
Emparking reached its zenith in the eighteen century , when the removal of villages to create or enlarge parks was a widespread phenomenon.
It then goes on to list a number of examples and features the story of Milton Abbas in Dorset which was dismantled over a period of fifteen years to make way for Baron Milton’s new park.
Trevor Rowley is an Emeritius Fellow at the University of Oxford, so this book can’t easily be dismissed by revisionist ‘historians’ who often seek to play down such occurances when defending the reputation of the British ruling class.
Originally published in 1982, this new third edition is an invaluable aid to recording and identifying the remains of past settlements and placing them in their total landscape context. As well as tracing the processes that led to desertion, this book provides a guide to the type of remains to be expected and describes some good examples
You can’t really understand English history without a thorough grounding in the English Revolution in the mid 1600s. That this is called the English Civil War in England, and the English Revolution elsewhere, is indicative of numerous attempts to rewrite this period of history to suit the winners and the powers that be.
Christopher Hill is a masterful guide to this period in history and this is a really good place to start understanding the revolution from a far broader perspective than ones you may have picked up from popular culture or school.
Featuring the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers, the Quakers and any number of other sects and radicals who survived to become religions or nineties festival bands, it is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that won out but of the far more fundamental overturning of society which many were driving for.
The land settlement societies and land settlement association, are along with the Plotlands movement, important forgotten parts of recent British history. They stand as highly useful and inspiring examples of post war movements of people back to the land and the countryside. The Plotlands were bottom up and anarcist in nature (although I highly doubt the participants would have identified as anarcist!), whilst the land settlement movement was far more top down with state and non state actors involved.
This book is short, sweet and very detailed about facts, figures and costs whilst making keen observations about the surrounding politics. The sub title ‘something must be done’ is a quote from Edward Windsor when he was part of the British royal family which in part antagonised the government to take action on the huge number of unemployed people in Wales by supporting them into running smallholding businesses. Edwards words were seen as inflamatory, and inappropriate meddling by the supposedly a-political monarchy at the time.
A book about the Kinder Scout trespass by a main organiser in his own words. Lots of stuff in here which I’d never learnt anywhere else, it’s hard to track down this out of print book but well worth the effort.
This is a really great deep dive into local Sheffield history whilst at the same time providing lots of context which I imagine would make it still of interest to those further afield.
I drank it down and revelled in the geekery, for example, did you know that Mount Pleasant is the name for the part of each town or city where all the night soil (aka human poo) was taken every morning so farmers could transport it to their land for fertiliser?
An account of farming in the Chelmsford area of Essex
Another book in the same genre as ‘Where Beards Wag All‘ which perfectly and poetically captures the last days of pre mechanised peasant agriculture in Essex and the first steps of the transition into fossil fuel fuelled farming. Simply and beautifully written, a good way to look back to look forward
A really beautiful insight into the last days of peasant agriculture in England before the post war mechanisation of agriculture and the role of the oral tradition in rural communities.
From his landmark study of rural life in East Anglia, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956), George Ewart Evans set about, in a series of books, unveiling the sylvan round of myth and merriment, plenty and hardship, that informed the traditions and texture of country living. Core to his chronicles is the oral tradition, echoing through the years, and it is this that he concentrates upon in Where Beards Wag All (1970). Here are the memories, unmediated and raw, of the craftsman, the drover, the marshman – a chorus to the seasons’ constant turn. And it is by no means an idyll they describe: thrift and want, poverty and subjection are often their lyric. The depression of the 1930s is vividly brought to life, and a particularly affecting section details the migration of East Anglian farm-workers to the maltings of Burton-on-Trent. Where Beards Wag All is a touching and faithful portrait of the countryside of fading memory.
This book is magnificent and tragically out of press with second hand copies going for silly money. I’ve tried to persuade the publisher to re-issue it or to make it available digitally but to no avail yet. Succint, throughly readable and utterly compelling, I hope your local library can sort you out with a copy.
Squatters were the original householders, and this book explores the story of squatter settlements in England and Wales, from our cave-dwelling ancestors to the squeezing out of cottagers in the enclosure of the commons.
There is a widespread folk belief that if a house could be erected between sundown and sunset the occupants had the right to tenure and could not be evicted. Often enquiry into the manorial court rolls shows this to be the case. Unofficial roadside settlements or encroachments onto the ‘wastes’ between parishes provided space for the new miners, furnacemen and artisans who made the industrial revolution, while cultivating a patch of ground and keeping a pig and some chickens. Colin Ward’s book, full of local anecdote and glimpses of surviving evidence, links the hidden history of unofficial settlements with the issues raised by 20th century squatters and the 21st century claims that ‘The Land is Ours’.
Colin presents a wealth of fascinating anecdote, analysis and polemic highlighting the sheer variety of ways individuals have created sustainable homes and livelihoods in nooks and crannies at the margins of society.” Regeneration and Renewal
“Rural squatters are now only a footnote in social history. Their families built themselves a house on some unregarded patch of land… For years, the environmental humanist Colin Ward has tried to rescue such people from the mythology of heritage museums, the indulgences of romantic novelists and the dust of local archives; and to draw lessons from them for today. Cotters and Squatters is the latest vivid instalment of his campaign.”The Independent
“Ward is not averse to a little squalor, or at least untidiness.The modern countryside is altogether too neatly packaged and sewn-up for the benefits of the well-off, he feels. Overzealous planning laws, and what he calls “the suffocating nimbyism of the countryside lobby, with its Range Rover culture,” are dismissed as an affront to rural history. His new book is an exploration of the long struggle of the rural poor to acquire and keep a roof over their heads.”The Guardian
Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture.
This is a truly epic piece of work which includes some compelling history lessons alongside being a cultural and practical manual for acquiring, working and thriving on the land in America. There is so much to learn here for land workers of colour as well as white people on an anti-racism journey.
We have included some of the things we learned from this book into recent performances of the show.
If you don’t want to dive straight into the book, Leah Penniman’s podcast with Farmerama is a good place to start or one of these blogs:
“In 1910, one in seven farmers were African-American and held titles to approximately 16-19 million acres of farmland. Over the next century, 98% of Black farmers were dispossessed through discriminatory practices at the USDA and various federal farm programs. These farmers were often denied loans and credit, lacked access to legal defense against fraud, and experienced “outright acts of violence and intimidation” resulting in a 90% loss of Black-owned farmland in the US.
Today, 98% of private rural land is owned by white people, while less than 1% is Black-owned. The USDA’s systemic bias against Black and minority farmers “is well documented” and affirmed by the 2010 Pigford vs. Glickman class action lawsuit, which resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement. Black farmers continue to experience discrimination in access to credit, seeds, and other assistance, and face foreclosure at six times the rate of their White counterparts.”
He came across an essay about a political pageant from the 1930s which has an interesting overlap with the structure of our show. The published essay is behind an academic paywall here but the author Mick Wallis has kindly provided his private copy of the essay which you can download from here if you don’t have an academic login to download from the link above.
Taken from the essay, here is the structure of a pageant performed to thousands of people in a stadium in the late 1930s:
Music and the People
Introduction
1. Feudal England. A canon from 1350; songs ‘that have lived in the peasant tradition for centuries, only lately collected because they were beginning to be forgotten’; a primitive fertility ritual dance; a Hebridean spinning song. (No dramatic action.)
2. The Massacre of the Innocents. Parts of two pageant-plays are performed, as if to the villagers: after the famous complaint from the Second Shepherds’ Play, Herod and the Innocents – ‘no doubt much of its popularity owed much to the memory of the massacres of their own people after the rising of 1381’; the song King Herod and the Cock in which ‘the invincible spirit’ wins against the oppressor; a choir of early Christians, following an introductory verse by Paul Robeson; and, since ‘the play’s not finished yet’ (i.e., of history) the Basque Lullaby.
3. Peasants in Revolt. A return to 1381: John Ball addresses the crowd; a signal arrives from him; the march on London, singing The Cutty Wren; Tyler’s meeting with Richard II, and murder (‘All words spoken in this scene, except for the commentary of the Speaker, are taken from authentic records’); all the men of the Mass Chorus (nine choirs) sing The German Peasants’ Song.
Interlude. ‘The ancient ritual carried on / And the forbidden message spoke’: members of the Woodcraft Folk ‘come on in small numbers, like conspirators, and perform the Stag-Dance’, part of the cult which was ‘the bond of unity between the harassed peasants’.
4. Soldiers of Freedom. Two Announcers briefly set the scene for 1649 (the episode is not concerned with celebrating Cromwell). ‘One king may be dead, but who still owns the land? Six Levellers and the actor-singer Parry Jones sit at tavern tables and sing; an Announcer recounts their talk as they remain in tableau; a group of dancers; some Diggers brought on in ropes by soldiers; an Announcer hails them in verse while the soldiers order drinks; the Diggers sing Stand up Now.
5. Village Green to Concert Hall. Announcer’s verse reports the break-up of rural communities and the appropriation of their culture by bourgeois institutions; ‘A group of dancers enters and performs to the tunes from which The Beggar’s Opera was concocted. At the end of their dance, a proscenium arch appears over the platform, and a scene from the play is performed to the dancers as audience.
Interval
6. Changing Europe. 1792. French revolution, singing the Carmagnole, verses 1 and 2, dressed as French peasants of 1790
7. Prisoners. ‘Ludwig van Beethoven descends from rostrum’; ‘But who are these / In modern clothes appearing / Their haggard eyes / The brand of torture like a web of scorpions wearing?’; prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps enter and sing the Peat-Bog Soldiers’ Song.
8. Slaves. ‘Following this train of thought’, John Payne and his Negro Choir enter as slaves, singing a chain-gang song, a cotton-picking song, and some ‘songs of freedom, led by one of the foremost champions of freedom’, Paul Robeson’.
9. The People Advance. As Robeson’s Kneelin’ Low ends, the Mass Chorus sings the Chartist We’re Low and the Speaker takes up a prose narrative to take us forward to trade unionism – ‘To every trade its club, to every club its song’ – and ‘the Trades Unionists sit round a table and sing their song’ (unspecified), ‘the verse sung solo’; ‘the tide rose apace’, and in a few sentences taking in the Co-operative Movement, the Speaker takes us to the late 1880s – a crowd headed by William Morris enters, singing People of England; the Speaker relates the killing by the police of the demonstrator in Trafalgar Square in 1880, and William Morris gives his famous ‘Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay’; the Chorus marches off to the Russian 1905 Funeral March, ‘that now commemorates all those who have fallen in the fight for freedom’.
The Speaker makes a summation in verse of the Pageant, and reflects on its meanings for us now:
And having present struggles and despairs Sharp in our minds, remember too The past whose urgent influence prepares The issues of today, and know that you By today’s action map the future’s road…. Never so needed was that single will That unity of the people, to fulfil The claim for freedom, and to ensure our peace… It is time we answered, as they answer now In Spain, in China, in every tortured land…. Let our song rise whose simple power Can flood the boundaries that divide us still And make our common hope, our single will.
Then a procession of groups: Christian Hymn; Levellers’ Song; Marseillaise; People of England; ‘Bandera Rossa’ ; German Solidarity Song; Chinese Student Song; Spanish National Anthem; (and now not representations but actual) veterans of the International Brigade led by Fred Copeman; the Negro Choir. Paul Robeson sings The Land of Freedom, ‘the great song of liberated Soviet humanity’, with the Acting Chorus (twelve choirs); Tom Mann, the Dean of Canterbury, and Fred Copeman speak briefly on the theme ‘Music and the People’ . Finally, all (audience included) sing the American Men Awake! the Day is Dawnin
You can’t really understand English history without a thorough grounding in the English Revolution in the mid 1600s. That this is called the English Civil War in England, and the English Revolution elsewhere, is indicative of numerous attempts to rewrite this period of history to suit the winners and the powers that be.
We are major Akala fans here in the herd and regularly send his various 
A really beautiful insight into the last days of peasant agriculture in England before the post war mechanisation of agriculture and the role of the oral tradition in rural communities.
This book is magnificent and tragically out of press with second hand copies going for silly money. I’ve tried to persuade the publisher to re-issue it or to make it available digitally but to no avail yet. Succint, throughly readable and utterly compelling, I hope your local library can sort you out with a copy.
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