From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting "one potato, two potato" and "eeny, meeny, miny, mo," "The" "Lore of the Playground "looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted, and the rituals and traditions they have observed over the past hundred years and more. Each generation has had its own favorites. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory, and some traditions have proved to be strongly regional,...

In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into street literature - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages...

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An engrossing guide to English folklore and traditions, with over 1,250 entries. Folklore is connected to virtually every aspect of life, part of the country, age group, and occupation. From the bizarre to the seemingly mundane, it is as much a feature of the modern technological age as of the ancient world.

- Oral and Performance genres-Cheese rolling,...