{"product_id":"the-singer-of-kent-folk-ballads-from-the-age-of-the-plague-england-1348-1395-9798197423726","title":"The Singer of Kent: Folk Ballads from the Age of the Plague England 1348 - 1395","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Michael McGilbourne\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Genres \u0026amp; Styles - Folk \u0026amp; Traditional\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFolk Ballads from the Age of the Plague England 1348 - 1395 \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou are the end point of an unbroken chain of survival. Every person who came before you - through plague, war, famine, and flood - lived long enough to pass forward what was necessary for you to exist. You did not begin when you were born. You began when humanity began. Everything that happened between that beginning and this moment is not the past in any abstract sense. It is the story of the making of you.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book takes you to one of the most extraordinary moments in that story. \u003cb\u003eThe Weald of Kent and London, England. 1348-1381 CE.\u003c\/b\u003e The Black Death has emptied half the village. The lord's roll still says you are not free. A boy-king of fourteen sits on the throne. Sixty thousand people are marching on London. One woman is carrying something none of them will write down. The arguments about what the songs were for have never stopped.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Singer of Kent\u003c\/i\u003e asks what it would have meant to be inside that moment.\u003c\/b\u003e Not as a king. Not as a chronicler. But as the ordinary woman - the alewife's daughter, the spinner - who carried a dirge learned in a single night through plague, rising, and reprisal, and one October evening sat at her doorway and gave every word of it to the next pair of hands.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat did the people sing when the chronicle refused to record them?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat is the difference between a rebel and a singer - when the song outlasts the rebellion?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat survives when the powerful write the history and the powerless write the songs?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat did sixty thousand people feel when they said the unsayable thing together for the first time?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe facts are extraordinary enough.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBy 1350, perhaps half of England's population was dead. Wages doubled overnight. Parliament passed a law to prevent it. The survivors ignored the law.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOn 12 June 1381, sixty thousand peasants stood at Blackheath and heard John Ball preach: \u003ci\u003eWhen Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe boy-king Richard II granted full freedom to every serf in England. He revoked every charter within three weeks.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe ballad tradition now known as the Child Ballads - still sung today - was born in this century, in mouths that had no other way to make the record last.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe songs outlasted every chronicle written by the men who never heard them.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHistory is not a sequence of dates.\u003c\/b\u003e It is the record of billions of lives lived forward through a present that was, to each of them, as urgent as your own. The hearthfire is low. The pottage smells of leek and bone. The bell rings before the light decides to be light. A woman sets her hands on the distaff and begins to sing. They sang what history did to them. They carried it past everything that should have destroyed it. This book is the attempt of one ordinary witness - a woman who understood the world by the feel of the thread in her hands - to answer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFor homeschooling families: \u003c\/b\u003e You are already doing the most important thing - putting the story of humanity directly into your children's hands. The \u003ci\u003eBeyond His Story We Stand\u003c\/i\u003e series was written for you. Each book takes one moment in human history and makes it lived rather than memorised, felt rather than filed away. Not a textbook. Not a syllabus. A story your child will not want to put down - and that will leave them asking the questions that no curriculum can generate for them. The questions that only wonder produces.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Singer of Kent\u003c\/i\u003e - part of the \u003ci\u003eBeyond His Story We Stand\u003c\/i\u003e series. A chronological journey through human history, told through the eyes of the people official history forgot to record.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe song survived. Not in stone. Not in Latin. In breath. Come and listen.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47891562823831,"sku":"9798197423726","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798197423726.webp?v=1781184109","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/the-singer-of-kent-folk-ballads-from-the-age-of-the-plague-england-1348-1395-9798197423726","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}