Books by George Ewart Evans

Pioneering book of oral history, The Pattern Under the Plough shows that even in modern societies, governed by science and technology, there are still traces of a civilisation whose beliefs were bound to the soil and whose reliance on the seasons was a matter of life or death.

A classic picture of the rural past in a remote Suffolk village, revealed in the conversations of old people who recall harvest customs, home crafts, poetic usages in dialect, old farm tools, smugglers' tales, and rural customs and beliefs going back to the time of Chaucer.

A reissue of a rare and remarkable book about every aspect of the life and legend of the wild hare - in nature, poetry, folklore, history and art. science, literature, mythology, superstition, semantics, venery, and a rich swathe of countryman's talk .

Features the oral history technique, giving pictures of the lives of domestic servants, business methods at the beginning of the century, horse-transport in a small town, clothes of the period, and the hard life of the miners in Wales.

The pioneering oral historian, George Ewart Evans, began to record the farming ways of East Anglia in the 1950s by listening to old men and women whose memories went back more than fifty or sixty years. Many were agricultural labourers, born before the turn of the century, who had worked on farms before the arrival of mechanisation. It was assumed at that time that horses would soon disappear from the farms, and that this was the last chance of recording the part they had played for centuries. It later became clear that this forecast was too pessimistic and in Horse Power and Magic (Faber, 1979) Ewart Evans describes in fascinating detail some important farms where horses continued to be beneficially used more than thirty years later. He discovered that the traditions of the older horsemen had not died out but had been passed on, in only slightly attenuated form, to a younger generation keen to farm with horses, proving that the day of the heavy horse was by no means over. He also describes vividly the ways of horse-tamers whose skills had a touch of 'magic' about them.'Taking his works a whole, there is no doubt that George Ewart Evans will survive as a fascinating pioneer of the extra-academic recording of human history...he has found a dimension all his own. This is indeed the very stuff of history.' Sunday Times

Shows the way in which oral history works. This book features some recorded talks by old men and women in East Anglian villages, whose tools and customs - and indeed whose ways of speech, which often survived from the times of Shakespeare and even Chaucer - repeated what had been familiar to many generations before them.

Following his two classics, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay and The Horse in the Furrow, renowned oral historian George Ewart Evans continues his study of the vanishing customs, working habits and rich language of the farming communities of East Anglia with The Pattern Under the Plough (Faber, 1966). Although based on East Anglia, this book was and remains of wider interest, for - as the author pointed out at the time - similar changes were occurring in North America, and also happening with remarkable speed in Africa.In chronicling the old culture George Ewart Evans has taken its two chief aspects, the home and the farm. He describes the house with its fascinating constructional details, the magic invoked for its protection, the mystique of the hearth, the link of the bees with the people of the house, and some of their fears and pre-occupations. Among the chapters on the farm is one of Evans's most original pieces of research: the description of the secret horse societies. Beautifully illustrated by David Gentleman, this book is important not only for the material it reveals about the past but for the implications for present-day society.'As real (and as valuable) as the evidence unearthed by the spadework of archaeology.' Observer

Akerman Flatt and his wife lived in a thatched cottage at the edge of the broad heathland of Fenhall. Acky is one of the survivors of those men who retired after the horses left the farms.

He also argues the case for historians to cast their net more widely, to entertain different voices, different cultures, in a more meaningful survey than documents alone can provide.The book is testament to a dimming way of life, and to a visionary man who strove to capture our final glimpses of it.

Describes thrift and want, poverty and subjection. This book covers the depression of the 1930s, and the migration of East Anglian farm-workers to the maltings of Burton-on-Trent. It presents a portrait of the countryside of fading memory.

Set in a rural mining village in South Wales in the years leading up to the Second World War, this book recreates a magical but alive world that will resonate with our memories, real and imagined, of childhood.