Originally published in 1968. The author, a well-known contemporary and friend of folklorist Katharine M. Briggs, collected a tremendous store of folk music material over many years and eventually decided to put some of it on permanent record. This book comprises a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. It describes individual folk singers in Somerset in great detail as personal accounts and documents their lyrics and their tunes, which are all together at the end of the volume.

Originally published in 1968. The author, a well-known contemporary and friend of folklorist Katharine M. Briggs, collected a tremendous store of folk music material over many years and eventually decided to put some of it on permanent record. This book comprises a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. It describes individual folk singers in Somerset in great detail as personal accounts and documents their lyrics and their tunes, which are all together at the end of the volume.

If wonder tales are not abundant in England, other kinds of folktales thrive: local traditions, historical legends, humorous anecdotes. Many of the favorite tales which English-speaking peoples carry with them from childhood come from a long tradition--stories as familiar to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, and their many contemporaries as they are to us.
"This is a fine, homely feast, immediately intelligble. . . ."--"Times Educational Supplement "
." . . should be of special concern to Americans since many of the tales are parallel to or the source of our own folk stories."--"Choice "
"This is entertainment, to be sure, but is also part of man's attempts to comprehend his world."--"Quartet "
""Folktales of England "is by all odds the most satisfactory general collection of folktales to come out of England since the advent of modern collection and classification techniques."--Ernest W. Baughman, "Journal of American Folklore "