Search results for ""Author Geoff Doel""

Providing readers with a seasonal anthology of the county, this collection of Sussex carols and customs, seasonal recipes and literary tales, re-examines the rich heritage of Christmas past from around the county. It features Christmas disasters, such as the Lewes avalanche, to well-known seasonal songs - such as Good King Wenceslas.

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For 400 years Kent and East Sussex were vividly and visibly associated with the cultivation of hops. Fran and Geoff Doel have evoked this bygone world of hopping by gathering together a wide range of social and literary accounts, poems and songs from the Tudor period to the present day, each with a contextual introduction. The selection illustrates both the ‘rose-tinted’ image and the harsher reality of a distinctive aspect of rural life in the south east.

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First mentioned by William Langland in the late fourteenth century, Robin Hood comes down to us through ballads and folksongs, old chronicles and plays, medieval allusions, folklore and place names. Today Robin Hood folk songs are found in the USA as well as in England and Scotland, and place names and traditions are widely located in England. The earliest stories are centred on Barnsdale in Yorkshire, but later the emphasis shifts to Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. Originally a yeoman, Robin was upgraded to aristocrat in the sixteenth century, but he remains essentially a champion of the poor and oppressed and a social nonconformer. How far Robin Hood was based on a historical character and how far he is an archetypal outlaw or a Greenwood myth (who must withdraw from society and commune with nature) is the subject of the Doels' wide-ranging study. This new edition is complete with an updated gazetteer of Robin Hood sites and an annotated filmography. It includes almost 50 illustrations (including performances by present-day mummers).

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An examination of the evidence for the historical Arthur and of the creation of the hero of medieval romances, through the early Welsh sources and the French Romances to Thomas Malory and the Tudor myth. The contribution of Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites and the connection with Tintagel and Glastonbury are also explored.

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In 1909, Canterbury antiquarian Percy Maylam published his research and remarkable photographs of the fascinating Kent tradition of the hooden horse. He caught the custom in its last traditional phase, but his work inspired a revival after the Second World War. Percy Maylam also published a famous essay on the Kent custom of Gavelkind when this was abolished by Act of Parliament just before the First World War. Percy's great-nephew Richard Maylam has long-wished for these two works to be reprinted. For this special edition Richard has unearthed additional, unpublished photographs and written a biographical essay on his great-uncle. Together with Richard, Mick Lynn and Geoff Doel have worked to make Percy Maylam's text available to a new generation of potential hoodeners and their audiences.

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