Graham Moore has written a number of brilliant songs about historical figures and events including one about Tom Paine and this one about the Tolpuddle Martyrs who got on the wrong side of the establishment for starting a workers’ union in the 1830’s.
His album is really good and can be bought from the usual suspects – iTunes, CD Baby and Amazon.
His website is https://grahamoore.blogspot.com/. Here is the track on youtube:
The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain
by Harry Hopkins
Published in 1985, this life changing book was given to me by Sam Lee.
“A beautiful telling of the age-old battle between peasant and landowner where for the price of a rabbit or a pheasant men were murdered, transported as convicts and executed.
This ancient struggle over game was not just about food for the poor poachers and their families, it was about social rank and the power of the landed gentry, the burgeoning class politics of the time and the harsh realities of rural life.”
A People’s History Of England
by A.L. Morton
A leading Marxist historian, book written in 1938. Recommended reading by Roy Palmer.
A.L. Morton’s wikipedia page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._L._Morton
An absolutely riveting, disturbing and fascinating read which turned my world view of history on its head. You can download a pdf of the book from https://libcom.org/files/England-part-1_0.pdf
The Many-Headed Hydra
by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker
This book gives much food for thought, bringing a fresh perspective to number of themes such as slavery and pirates which help put English peasant struggles of the time in a wider context.
Whilst I would highly recommend it, I would also advise with some caution as the scholarship is not as widely respected as it might be.
This review from the Guardian does a good job and it worth a look – http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/27/historybooks
Harvest
by Jim Crace
This is the only fiction book I have in this section at the moment and it is a gem.
Set in medieval times, the story concerns a village about to be enclosed for sheep farming.
Here are the books which Hazel Perry brought along to the workshops localising the show for Peterborough…
Free Thinkers and Troublemakers: Fenland Dissenters / Harry Jones / Published by the Wisbech Society & Preservation Trust / ISBN 0951922076
Peterborough: A Story of City and Country, People and Places / (Peterborough City Council, published by Pitkin) / ISBN 1-84165-050-1
From Punt to Plough: A History of the Fens / Rex Sly / The History Press / ISBN 978-0-7509-3398-8
Peterborough (Britain In Photographs) / Lisa Sargood / Budding Books / ISB 1-84015-247-8
Peterborough Through Time (A Second Selection) / June and Vernon Bull / ISBN 978-1-84868-990-9
The Lost Fens / England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster / Ian D Rotherham / ISBN 978-0-7524-8699-4
Peterborough / HF Tebbs / ISBN 0900891300
So powerful re-reading the words of Thomas More from ‘Utopia’ now I understand the historical context of his words.
The first part of the book is largely a critique of the society around him written in a fictional form to protect him from persecution…
“your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves.”
http://www.bartleby.com/209/55.html
In short, communities were deprived of their access to land to make way for sheep. The wool from these sheep became the first resource to be mass produced and traded leading to massive accumulation of excess capital in the hands of a few large landowners.
This excess capital could be invested in ships which laid the foundation for empires and slavery bringing along the second big accumulation of excess capital.
Read the wikipedia entry here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)
The blog Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell Smith has been a near constant source of excellent original research into the state of land ownership in England for the last few years. It was happy news when the learnings from this project were augmented in summer 2019 with the arrival of an eponymous book written by Guy.
Now it would be amiss of me to state at this point that both Guy and Anna are good friends of mine and I was one of the people who read Guy’s draft and fed back into the book’s journey. Luckily, I genuinely thought and do think that this is a really great read which draws the reader through the important information Guy and Anna have uncovered, illustrated with insights, stories and more than enough linguistic colour to be really quite compelling.
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