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,...

London is a city with almost as many ancient legends and deep-rooted customs as it has streets and landmarks, and here a leading folklorist brings together an astonishingly rich selection of them--tales of ghosts and witches; stories about fabled events, heroes, and villains; and accounts of local supersitions and beliefs. Beyond simply retelling these stories it also delves through layers of hearsay and speculation to investigate how and why they arose. In the process, it shows how the story of Dick Whittington and his cat has connections with the ancient Middle East, explains why lions...

This enthralling book will take you, month-by-month, day-by-day, through all the festivities of English life. From national celebrations such as New Year s Eve to regional customs such as the Padstow Hobby Horse procession, cheese rolling in Gloucestershire and Easter Monday bottle kicking in Leeds, it explains how they originated, what they mean and when they occur. A fascinating guide to the richness of our heritage and the sometimes eccentric nature of life in England, The English Year offers a unique chronological view of our social customs and attitudes"

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...

This Dictionary is part of the Oxford Reference Collection using sustainable print-on-demand technology to make the acclaimed backlist of the Oxford Reference programme perennially available in hardback format.
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,...