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.
A.L. Lloyd includes this song about poaching as resistance to enclosure in his book Folk Song in England where he noted that it was “obtained by Frank Kidson from a singer in Goole, Yorkshire” and comments:
There are two distinct broadsheet songs which tell of the unhappy death of Bill Brown, a poacher shot by the gamekeeper at the village of Brightside, near Sheffield, in 1769. That a version of one of them might still be collected from tradition as late as the beginning of this century should be attributed to the extraordinary vitality which many of the broadside ballads had in the minds and hearts of the commons of England. Certainly the character of Bill Brown and the desire to avenge his death was sufficient to raise the necessary sympathetic bond between street singers and their audiences.
A.L. Lloyd further commented in the sleeve notes of Roy Harris’s 1972 record The Bitter and the Sweet:
When the practice of enclosing common-land for the benefit of lofty landlords was stepped up in the 18th century, it caused hardship and fierce resentment over the broad acres. For some reason, resistance to this injustice was specially fierce in the triangle roughly bounded by Sheffield, Lincoln and Nottingham, and within this area for more than half a century there was virtual guerrilla was between poacher and keeper. The sullen bloodshot ballad of Bill Brown, who was shot dead at Brightside, near Sheffield, in 1769, is characteristic of the poacher broadsides that moved the disaffected villagers of the time (and for long after). The tune was noted in Lincolnshire by Frank Kidson’s devoted informant, Mr Lolley, about eighty years ago.
You gentlemen, both great and small, Gamekeepers, poachers, sportsmen all, Come listen to me simple clown, I’ll sing you the death of poor Bill Brown, I’ll sing you the death of poor Bill Brown.
One stormy night, as you shall hear, ‘Twas in the season of the year. We went to the woods to catch a buck, But in that night we had bad luck, Bill Brown was shot and his dog was stuck.
Well, we got to the woods, our sport begun, I saw the gamekeeper present his gun, I called on Bill to climb the gate, To get away, but it was too late, For there he met his untimely fate.
Well, we got to the woods, our sport begun, I saw the gamekeeper present his gun, I called on Bill to climb the gate, To get away, but it was too late, For there he met his untimely fate.
I dressed myself next night in time, I got to the wood as the clock struck nine; The reason was, and I’ll tell you why, To find that gamekeeper I did go try, Who shot my friend, and he shall die.
I ranged the woods all over, and then I looked at my watch and it was just ten. I heard a footstep on the green, I hid myself for fear of being seen, For I plainly saw it was Tom Green.
I took my gun all in my hand, Resolved to fire if Tom should stand; Tom heard a noise and turned him round. I fired and brought him to the ground, My hand gave him his deep death wound.
Now revenge, you see, my hopes has crowned. I’ve shot the mam that shot Bill Brown. Poor Bill no more these eyes will see; Farewell, dear friend, farewell to ye, I’ve crowned your hopes and your memory.
The Bitter Withy was a popular carol carried in the oral tradition for many generations, believed to date back to the 15th century. In it some haughty young lords are drowned by a young Jesus after they mock him for being poor:
As it fell out on a bright holiday Small hail from the sky did fall; Our Saviour asked his mother dear If he might go and play at ball.
“At ball? At ball? My own dear son? It’s time that you were gone; Don’t let me hear of any complaints At night when you come home.”
So up the hill and down the hill Our sweet young Saviour ran Until he met three rich lords’, “Good morning to each one.”
“Good morn, good morn, good morn,” said they, “Good morning,” then said he, “And which of you three rich young lords Will play at ball with me?”
“We are all lords’ and ladies’ sons Born in a bower and hall, And you are nothing but a poor maid’s child Born in an ox’s stall.”
Sweet Jesus turned him round about, He did neither laugh nor smile, But the tears came trickling from his eyes Like water from the sky.
“If you’re all lords’ and ladies’ sons Born in your bower and hall, I’ll make you believe in your latter end I’m an angel above you all”
So he made him a bridge of the beams of the sun And over the water ran he; The rich young lords chased after him And drowned they were all three.
So up the hill and down the hill Three rich young mothers ran Saying, “Mary mild, fetch home your child For ours he’s drowned each one.”
“Oh I’ve been down in yonder town Far as the holy well, I took away three sinful souls And dipped them deep in hell.”
Then Mary mild, she took her child And laid him across her knee And with a handful of withy twigs She gave him slashes three.
“Oh bitter withy, oh bitter withy You’ve caused me to smart. And the withy shall be the very first tree To perish at the heart.”
This song is traditionally thought to date back to the 1300s and have been sung by participants of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Worth noting that wikipedia and academia are both are keen to point out that there is no evidence of this, but people in the trad folk tradition are equally quick to point out in return that academics historically often have little idea about the oral tradition.
In A.L.Lloyd’s excellent Folk Song In England he states:
(The song) is often thought of as an amiable nursery piece yet when it was recorded from an old shepherd of Adderbury West, near Banbury, he banged the floor with his stick on the accented notes and stamped violently at the end of the verses, saying that to stamp was the right way and reminded of old times.
What memories of ancient defiance are preserved in this kind of performance it would be hard to say , but we do know that the wren-hunting song was attached to pagan midwinter ritual of the kind that the Church and authority fulminated vainly against- particularly in the rebellious perdio at the end of the Middle Ages when adherence to the forms of the Old Religion was taken to be evidence of subversion, and its partisans were violently persectuted in consequence.
In the sleeve notes of an Ian Campbell Folk Group record, A.L. Lloyd had this further explanation:
Some of the most ancient, most enduring and at the same time most mysterious English folk songs are those concerned with the attributes and sacrifice of monstrous animals. At the end of the 14th century, when peasant rebellion was in the air, the old magical song of the gigantically powerful bird (presented by a kind of folklore irony as a tiny wren) took on a tinge of new meaning. For here was the story of a great fowl so hard to seize, so difficult to dismember but so apt for sharing among the poor; and what did that suggest but a symbol of seignorial property?
Lyrics
“O where are you going?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “We’re off to the woods,” said John the Red Nose
“What will you do there?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “We’ll hunt the Cutty Wren,” said John the Red Nose
“How will you shoot her?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “With bows and with arrows,” said John the Red Nose
“That will not do then,” said Milder to Maulder “O what will do then?” said Festle to Foes “Big guns and big cannons,” said John the Red Nose
“How will you bring her home?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “On four strong men’s shoulders,” said John the Red Nose
“That will not do then,” said Milder to Maulder “O what will do then?” said Festle to Foes “Big carts and big waggons,” said John the Red Nose
“How will you cut her up?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “With knives and with forks,” said John the Red Nose
“That will not do then,” said Milder to Maulder “O what will do then?” said Festle to Foes “Big hatches and cleavers,” said John the Red Nose
“Who’ll get the spare ribs?” said Milder to Maulder “O we may not tell you,” said Festle to Foes “We’ll give them all to the poor,” said John the Red Nose
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.
Dr John Baxter has a project exploring intersection of folk and music hall, the songs and social history at http://folksongandmusichall.com/.
On the below blog he details a number of other songs about the Three Acres And A Cow election campaign of 1885/6 other than the one that we share in the show. It seems that the others were mocking the labourers for hoping for such a thing, or even for being fooled into thinking it would ever be possible!
Lovely short film about a plotlands settlement on the salt marshes of Lowsy Point near Barrow-in-Furness in northwest England. Watch via https://vimeo.com/wurstundgritz/acre or embedded below. Read Colin Ward’s Arcadia for All to learn more about the Plotlands.
I was relistening to the The History of Rome again recently, and I wanted to flag up this one about Tiberius Gracchus the first Roman leader to seriously attempt land reform:
The audio quality isn’t great but it is short and really on point. Unsettling how many similarities there are with our present day, historic themes do seem to play out on repeat. In fact this episode is also not too different to some of the land reform themes that are on display when Mike covers the Mexican Revolution too. If you also listen to the previous episode 28, that might help with additional context.
Money earned through enslavement played a key role in the eviction of Highlanders in the 18th and 19th centuries, study finds
Between roughly 1750 and 1860, wealthy landowners forcibly evicted thousands of Scottish Highlanders in order to create large-scale sheep farms. Known today as the Highland Clearances, this era of drastic depopulation sparked the collapse of the traditional clan system and the mass migration of Scotland’s northernmost residents to other parts of the world.
As Alison Campsie reports for the Scotsman, new research argues that this pivotal period in Scottish history had close ties to the enslavement of people in British colonies, with a cadre of individuals enriched by slavery evicting at least 5,000 people from their property and buying up more than one million acres of land relinquished during the clearances.
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.
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
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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