Stephen Roud

Are black cats lucky or unlucky? What should you do when you hear the first cuckoo? Since when have people believed that it's unlucky to shoot an albatross? Why does breaking a mirror lead to misfortune? This fascinating collection answers these and many other questions about the world of superstitions and forms an endlessly browsable guide to a subject that continues to obsess and intrigue.

"The first major new survey in over a generation, this exploration of the superstitions of the British Isles explains not only what people have believed over the centuries, and why, but when particular superstitions arose, which parts of the country adopted them, how they evolved, and what people believe today. Drawing extensively on literary and oral accounts from Roman times to the present, it offers intriguing insights into beliefs and the bizarre rituals that often accompany them, debunks many popular myths, and provides in the process a fascinating sideways view of changing social customs and attitudes." Drawing extensively on literary sources from medieval times to the present, this survey not only explains what people have believed and why, but when superstitions arose, which parts of the country adopted them, how they evolved and what people today believe.

From conkers to marbles, from skipping to tag, not forgetting 'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', "Lore of the Playground "explores the world of Britain's playgrounds, and looks at the games children have enjoyed and the rhymes they have chanted over the past hundred years and more. Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - Knock Down Ginger in the 1950s, Chain Tig in the 1970s. 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, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80, to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.

"This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature--ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints--in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature."--

In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure. But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding? This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more.