The Seasons E-Book

Nick Groom

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 674

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award and runner-up for Countryfile Book of the Year. For millennia, the passing seasons and their rhythms have marked our progress through the year. But what do they mean to us now that we lead increasingly atomised and urban lives and our weather becomes ever more unpredictable or extreme? In this splendidly rich and lyrical celebration of the English seasons, Nick Groom investigates the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries and shows how tradition and our links with nature still have a vital role to play in all our lives.

Leseprobe

THE SEASONS

Also by Nick Groom

The Gothic

The Union Jack

The Forger’s Shadow

Introducing Shakespeare

The Making of Percy’s Reliques

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Nick Groom, 2013

The moral right of Nick Groom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-161-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78239-206-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-162-5

Designed & typeset in Quadraat by Richard Marston Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Extract from ‘Journey of the Magi’ taken from Selected Poems by T. S. Eliot © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Extract from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Extract from ‘The Waste Land’ taken from The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Extract from ‘Autumn’ taken from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin © Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; ‘The Cyder Feast’ from The Cyder Feast and Other Poems by Sacheverell Sitwell, reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Sacheverell Sitwell; ‘The Minister’ by R. S. Thomas, from Collected Poems: 1945–1990, The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London, copyright © R. S. Thomas, 1993; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © J. R. R. Tolkien, 1975.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Dedicated to Matilda and Dorothyin the hope that the English seasons do not become history

As on this whirligig of Time

We circle with the seasons.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

‘Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue’

CONTENTS

AcknowledgementsNotes on the TextList of Illustrations Foreword Part I  1Introduction  2The Year  3Months and Days  4The Weather

Part II

  5

SPRING

  6Easter  7The Cuckoo

Part III

  8

May Day

  9SUMMER

Part IV

10

A Land Enclosed

11AUTUMN

Part V

12

WINTER

13Christmas and the Twelve Days14Past, Present, and Future

Notes

BibliographyIndex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book of this magnitude, and which has been in preparation for some years, means that I am indebted to many people who may not even have realized they were providing assistance when I questioned them on some recondite area of expertise. I am grateful to all my colleagues at the University of Exeter who have supported me in this project and responded to work-in-progress in seminars and lectures, in particular Regenia Gagnier, Andrew McNeillie, Ayesha Mukherjee, Henry Power, Angelique Richardson, and Jane Spencer. I would also like to thank library staff at the University of Exeter (both Tremough and Streatham campuses), as well as at the British Library and the Bodleian Library. Parts of this work were aired in early drafts in conferences and seminars at the following universities: Cambridge, Cardiff, Keele, Loughborough, Plymouth, St Andrews, and Sheffield; and I would like to thank the organizers and participants for these opportunities and for discussing the work candidly, most notably Nicholas Allen, John Brannigan, Matthew Campbell, Robert Macfarlane, Dafydd Moore, Becky Munford, Nicholas Roe, Adam Rounce, Jos Smith, Shelley Trower, and Julian Wolfreys. I also spoke on May Day at the Du Maurier Festival, and so would also like to thank the organizers of that event. Margaret Bushell, Revd Anthony Geering, Peter Gilliver, John Goodridge, Jonathon Green, Michael Nath, Steve Roud, Ian Wilson, Richard Wright, Moon Farm (Devon), and Wren Music responded promptly to queries. I am particularly grateful to Helen Parker-Bray, who generously read and commented acutely on several sections, to the meticulous dedication and erudition of Ben Dupré, who copy-edited the text, and to James Nightingale, who carefully guided the book through production.

David Godwin and his team have provided reliable support over the years, and Toby Mundy and all at Atlantic generously backed this project through all its ebbs and flows. The Devonshire Arms, the King’s Arms, the Oxenham Arms, and the Seven Stars have been essential allies, as have The Academy and Elegia (who provided sponsorship for the illustrations).

My most profound debts, however, are to my editor Angus MacKinnon, and the photographer Chris Chapman. Angus was tireless in suggesting revisions to the manuscript – drawing my attention to infelicities of style, inconsistencies in argument, and non sequiturs, while maintaining both his good humour and undimmed faith in the book. Any errors or inaccuracies that remain are my own. Chris’s remarkable images were one of the inspirations for this project and it is a privilege to be able to place his photographs alongside my own text. I am very grateful for his permission to include them. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Joanne, for putting up with my writing when I might have been playing in the garden with our children; I hope that when they read the book they will see why I thought that it was worth the sacrifice of a few summer afternoons.

NOTES ON THE TEXT

References

All sources have been checked against the originals where possible, and therefore quotations in this book can be treated as accurate and reliable; only in a handful of unavoidable instances is primary material taken from secondary sources. For both better and worse, folklore scholarship tends to be collaborative: A finds X and sends it to B, who adds Y and informs C, who publishes it as Z. The problem, of course, is that A might never have intended X to be published without further verification. With this chain of Chinese whispers in mind, I have always tried to trace the earliest and most reliable source. My findings frequently contest accepted scholarship; in such cases, I accept that other evidence elusive to me may subsequently arise – but in the meantime, I trust that readers will accept my citations as primary sources.

First printings have, in the main, been preferred to modern editions for the simple reason that the texts used in this study were often heavily revised. A few modern editions are standard, but some create as many problems as they solve. Thomson’s The Seasons is, appropriately, the watershed text for this book, but while I have often used James Sambrook’s edition, I have also referred to early printings of The Seasons where necessary. Any significant divergences are noted.

Notes are given as simply as possible: author/title/editor, date and (where necessary) volume number, and page number/folium/signature; full citations are given in the bibliography. All quotations from Shakespeare are given as act, scene, and line number from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al (1974), unless otherwise indicated.

Modernization

It is important in a book such as this, which charts the history of the seasons, to impart the literary flavour of earlier epochs and to enjoy the expression and orthography of bygone ages. Consequently, spelling has not been modernized except in cases where not to modernize would make the originals unfamiliar – lines from William Shakespeare being an obvious example. Likewise, typography has been modernized only where obsolete conventions such as the macron would obscure meaning; such revision has been indicated in the notes. After some thought, the ‘vv’ for ‘w’ has been modernized, as have usages such as ‘u’ for ‘v’ and ‘i’ for ‘j’ (and vice versa); this has meant that some of Edmund Spenser’s deliberate archaisms have been lost, but I have reluctantly made this decision in the interests of consistency and accessibility. Despite these changes, it is hoped that the challenge of unfamiliar spellings will still be enjoyed by the reader as part of the puzzle of early English literature. The warning ‘sic’ is very seldom used in direct quotation from historical sources as spelling was fluid before the early nineteenth century; when ‘sic’ does appear, it usually notes a verbatim usage by a modern or contemporary writer, a typographical error, or an exceptional spelling open to misinterpretation. Square brackets ‘[]’ indicate editorial elucidation, such as adding necessary punctuation.

Capitalization

The seasons spring, summer, autumn, and winter are not capitalized except when referring to personifications of the season, or if capitalized in quotations – although here the personification may in any case be ambiguous and the result of printing conventions; likewise ‘nature’ and ‘Nature’, and ‘sun’, ‘moon’, and ‘earth’. Archaic capitalization is retained. ‘Countryside’, ‘nature’, and similar words are used in commonsense ways throughout, although their usage and meanings have been challenged by environmental writers such as Donna Landry and Timothy Morton. Anyone who wishes to pursue these arguments should refer to the bibliography.

Religious Festivals

Religious festivals are given their most popular or generic names, although some confusion between the Book of Common Prayer and the Roman Catholic Church is inevitable; in such cases, no offence is intended and apologies are offered in advance if any is taken. Saints’ day festivals are described as follows: the ‘vigil’ is the eve of the day, the ‘feast’ the day itself, and the ‘morrow’ the day after.

Dating

Caution has to be exercised when translating dates from old calendars to the present calendar. Many English weather proverbs were originally based on the Julian calendar, retained until September 1752. The country then switched to the Gregorian calendar: this meant that eleven days had to be dropped from the year (see Chapter 2). Consequently, Julian dating can be up to thirteen days behind Gregorian dating, and from 2100 the difference will be fourteen days. This means that English May Day celebrations before 1752 would have taken place on our current date of 14 May.

Some dates are, however, independent of these calendars and are calculated by solar and lunar events. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon (see Chapter 6), which means that it can occur on one of thirty-five possible dates – hence it is a ‘moveable feast’. This in turn affects the timing of other festivals such as Lent and Pentecost, which map onto the Julian and Gregorian calendars in different ways. Still other dates are calculated by month and week. British Summer Time (BST) begins on the last Sunday in March, and most bank holidays fall on Mondays.

Definitions

In the interests of clarity, the seasons in this book are aligned with the months according to the simple rule of thumb adopted by the Met Office: spring is March, April, and May; summer is June, July, and August; autumn is September, October, and November; winter is December, January, and February. There is no reason why seasons should commence at the beginning of every third month, and no reason why spring and summer should be longer than autumn and winter by a day or two, but it makes organizing the year in a work such as this manageable – and that is the spirit in which these divisions should be understood. Indeed, calendars tended to shift the dates into each quarter by ten days, so spring for example customarily began around 10 March. But the calendar has always ultimately been driven by practicalities rather than theory – which is why it has been periodically adjusted, whether by adding whole intercalated months in ancient times or the modern practice of adding or subtracting certain days. My minor generalizations are therefore infinitesimally small compared with the ways in which the calendar has been wracked over the centuries.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Arthur Brown hand shearing at Moor Gate, North Bovey (1979)

Chagford Pony Sale (1977)

Dawn from Houndtor (1977)

Jack Lewis chain harrowing, Murchington (1988)

Charlie Mead turning over his vegetable plot, Mount Pleasant Farm, Murchington (1998)

Shirley Stephens and Rosemary Mudge loading bales, Huccaby Farm (1999)

Eileen Clarke being bounced on a boundary stone, Throwleigh Beating the Bounds (1991)

Rogation Sunday, Gidleigh (1996)

Derek Hext at lambing time, Buckland in the Moor (1999)

Heather Wright, Lustleigh May Queen (1977)

Cogs & Wheels dancing at dawn, Mayday, Nine Maidens, Belstone (1999)

Percy Rice of Moretonhampstead hedging on Washford Hill (1976)

Cider Making, Easton Barton, Hittisleigh (1982)

Will Webber winter feeding, Gidleigh (1981)

Maggie Clark weighing turkeys, Mill Farm, Throwleigh (1982)

‘Monks Path’, Ter Hill (1989)

All photographs are © Chris Chapman and are used with kind permission.

FOREWORD

The Seasons makes no claim to be a definitive account of the English seasons, or of their weather, folklore, and festive customs. Indeed, I soon realized that such a complete account would prove an impossibly Herculean labour, never mind the equivalent and equally extensive histories of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. I also realized that far from writing an extended note of regret or even an obituary, my supposedly dying and arguably dead subject – the cultural calendar of England – kept displaying vital signs: I discovered aggressively living traditions in nearly every corner of the country. This was most heartening, but something else emerged from such vibrancy: the more I wrote about the peculiarities of local customs, the more fragmented the big picture became. I wanted to preserve the particularity of these strong regional identities and not shoe-horn them into a grand overall argument concerning the decay of Englishness, but there was too much material, it was too local, and it was always changing. The concept of a unified England kept dissolving in my hands: what was said or done in one locale was quite different, and perhaps in contradiction to, what was done a few miles down the road. It was simply all too overwhelming, too prolix, and so I changed tack.

This book is now a hybrid study, a sort of antiquarianism for the present times: part history, part almanac and part polemic – both a restitution of waning lore and a rallying cry for national renewal. If English society has experienced the seasons as much as a series of cultural events as it has understood them as part of the cycle of the farming year, then the ground of current environmental debate should be shifted to include the study of literature, cultural history, and folklore. Historically this mixed seasonal culture was one of the things that once gave the nation a shared identity. But if this communal heritage is in terminal decline, vestiges of these representations nevertheless remain and continue to shape the ways in which we understand and appreciate the countryside of England. Consequently it is my firm belief that the analysis of climate change should not be confined to bio-scientists and meteorologists: the environmental crisis is a cultural issue too, with profound implications for how our society makes sense both of itself and of the landscape in which it has dwelt for millennia.

This book also has an aim that is a good deal more practical: to encourage much more involvement in the festive year, which for centuries has been extraordinarily rich and varied. This does not mean that there should be, say, tens of thousands of people chasing a cheese down Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire every Spring Bank Holiday – there are locals enough doing that already. But why not go, cheer the runners on, and make a donation? ‘They also serve who only stand a round.’1 One of the many things I have learnt in the course of researching and writing The Seasons was that for all the enthusiasts, revivalists, and busybodies (myself included) organizing local events, performances, sessions, and competitions, there is as much to be said for simply turning up at the local pub during a carnival, fair, pageant, festival, annual celebration, or the like and steadfastly drinking from lunchtime until bedtime. To do so offers as much support for the cause as getting involved in all sorts of other, more complicated (and sometimes more compromising) ways.2 It is sociable, it acknowledges the community, and it is like tipping a hat: you can say hello to one and all, thank the company, and then get on with spending money at the bar and keeping the pub solvent. And perhaps it is here, in this friendly fug, that you yourself might even start to plan your own locally distinctive celebration of the English seasons. If you do so, you will become part of a new and long-overdue devolution, that of England from Britain.

We need to re-establish English festivals as occasions for local communities, otherwise they will become prey to extremists or commercial exploitation. I am not a fanatic for English nationalist politics and am horrified by aggressive displays of ‘popular’ chauvinism that seem all too frequent in sports such as football. But I do admire the Scots, Welsh, and Irish for their independence of mind and culture within the larger identities of the UK and Europe, and I rue the extent to which the English, whoever we may be in the first decades of the twenty-first century, have allowed our bountiful harvest home of traditions to become subsumed and dissolved within the Union. We may not have our own parliament yet – a political anomaly for which there is no justification – but we do have our own seasonal culture of the year. That culture can redefine the very essence of Englishness as something that can be enjoyed across England by anyone who is prepared to listen to history and then learn the one lesson of folklore: that it is up to all of us to make it up.

Nick Groom

South Zeal,

St Frideswide’s Day, 2012

Part I

1        INTRODUCTION

A word spoken in due season, how good is it!

Proverbs 15: 23

Once, the annual cycle of the seasons must have seemed eternal and indomitable. The year moved from the birdsong and flowers of spring through summer’s work of harvesting and husbandry to autumnal stocktaking and into the icy challenge of winter. Every year was different, but the pattern of the seasons was consistent – a consistency powerfully strengthened by a rich calendar of proverbial lore, annual rituals, and frequent festivities. Although the weather and the seasons actually had an element of unpredictability from year to year, they were nevertheless yoked to a calendar that marked their characteristics and their progress with absolute certainty.

But now everything is changing. The seasons are blurring, they no longer have such apparently distinctive beginnings and ends. Winters can be unpleasantly warm, and summers uncomfortably wet and windy, and the months are no longer so readily defined by what weather or fortune they might bring. And as the complex rhythms of our weather are changing – and with them our sense, once close and vital, of the seasons – we are also losing and forgetting that shared seasonal heritage too. Once common cultural references are forgotten, and twenty-first-century British society is becoming ever more remote from the social and economic realities of rural life. Modern agricultural practice and climate change have clearly had their unwelcome effects, but perhaps it is precisely because those shared reference points and memories are fading that the seasons now seem so unstable.

It is time then to reflect what we risk losing if we cannot make sense of the sun, rain, and tempest, or of snow, frost, and hail – if we cannot make sense of them, that is, beyond the immediate practicalities of the weather forecast. What of our relationships with solstices and equinoxes, with the first cuckoo of spring and the last swallow of summer, and with all our rich inheritance of axiomatic wisdom, national folklore, and traditional festivity? What of the extraordinary compendium that centuries, if not millennia, of worship and study and experience of the seasons – as well as straightforward, first-hand familiarity with the weather – have created and bequeathed to us? If we abandon – or are forced to abandon – our hitherto intimate relationship with the seasons, will our lives be any the less? Will we lose an arcane knowledge, a key to an understanding of ourselves and our own place within the natural world: a key that is irreplaceable?

This book will touch upon many subjects to argue that our daily experience of the climate and the calendar still bears the deep stamp of centuries of culture, history, religion, politics, and agriculture. Yet that stamp is not indelible, and we need now more than ever to be reminded of our cultural inheritance. So here there are chapters on the folklore, customs, and literature of each season mixed with, among other things, a history of the calendar, accounts of saints’ days, early theories of the weather, the calculation of Easter, the arrival of the cuckoo, James Thomson’s best-selling political-pastoral poem The Seasons, and a summary of the grievous impact of the Enclosure Laws.

How we have viewed that climate and calendar is a vast subject, but any book can only be so long, and I have reluctantly had to exclude chapters on a number of closely associated themes, among them the pastoral and picturesque, and their often deleterious effect on the countryside and our perceptions of it. Pastoral poetry evolved out of the Renaissance’s fascination with all things classical, spinning a direct line from Hesiod, Theocritus, and, later, Virgil to the English countryside – finding perhaps its greatest exponent in Edmund Spenser. In essence, the pervasive cult of the pastoral attempted to overlay an ancient, classical, and largely bucolic view of the land onto the fields, woods, and common ground of sixteenth-century England. But although for the vast majority of its inhabitants the Elizabethan and Stuart countryside was less an Arcadia than a harsh and unforgiving working environment, a stranger to prancing satyrs, flute-playing shepherds, and the Mediterranean sun alike, the cult of the pastoral proved to be remarkably tenacious, subtly shaping the land and making the labouring rural population vanish from this vision of England – and indeed, the pastoral still survives in a popular if degraded form today.

Similarly, picturesque painting styles approached the natural scenery of late eighteenth-century England with expectations and preconceptions derived from Claude Lorrain, a French Baroque artist best known for his Italian landscapes. Moreover, science was at hand to help England conform to Claude’s Mediterranean visualization. For those spectators who lacked the imagination to see as Claude might have seen, or for those painters who lacked the artistic skills to paint as he might have painted, there was the ‘Claude glass’. This was a tinted convex mirror: the tinting enhanced colours, while the convexity flattened and miniaturized a natural scene into what appeared to be a two-dimensional composition, drawing all the elements together. Detail was lost, but harmony was enhanced: voilà, the picturesque, which drained history, tradition, and folklore from seasonal landscapes and replaced them with an oddly disengaged sentimentality. To this was added a sometimes frankly bizarre obsession with the sublime, and much ink was spilt on ascertaining how many cows gave the best balance to a painting, the most tonally effective time of day or year to paint flowers and trees, or where best to situate a ruined temple or wild cataract in a composition. And once again, the actual population of the countryside was, quite literally, expunged from the picture, just as it had been physically removed by the Enclosure Acts.

In spite of all this, the seasons still remain not only integral to our identity as a nation today but their heritage also demonstrates that culture can be a vital guide as we march blindly down the dark road of environmental change. If we ignore or choose to forget the culture of the seasons that has accumulated over thousands of years, our very humanity risks being eroded forever. Traditionally, our identity has been firmly built on the weather. Televised weather forecasts are a constant reminder of the proximity of the nations, provinces, and regions that make up the British Isles, of the island mentality, and of separation from Europe and the European climate. Samuel Johnson famously noted over 250 years ago that, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.’1 Weather is unpredictable and yet is continually being predicted, as if in an attempt to master it. But the weather does – or at least did – go through recognizable seasons, each with its own horticultural and agricultural role, and also each with its own character, history, and folklore. Together, they can map out the year, the countryside, and one’s place in it. The disappearance of the seasons will therefore erode a shared sense of identity, the present will become cut off from the past, and the culture of the seasons, from Geoffrey Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, will become strange. The ground we walk upon will fundamentally change as familiar flora and fauna become less numerous and are replaced by more aggressive imports such as grey squirrels, ladybugs, and Spanish bluebells.

There is nothing new in this – many apparently indigenous animals and plants, from rabbits to roses, are imports – but the gradual abstraction of seasonal life is accelerating, and alongside it the human aspect, the festive calendar, increasingly appears to be in terminal decline:

Merry Old England died in the country a great while ago; and the sports, the pastimes, the holidays, the Christmas greens and gambols, the archeries, the may-mornings, the May-poles, the country dances, the masks, the harvest-homes, the new-year’s-gifts, the gallantries, the golden means, the poetries, the pleasures, the leisures, the real treasures – were all buried with her.2

This nostalgic lament for Merry England does not date from the early twenty-first century, nor even from the early twentieth century, but was written by the poet and radical Leigh Hunt in 1817. It is ironic that it was written before the Victorian age, which through revival and invention has furnished us with so many of the images and impressions, customs and celebrations that seem to characterize the festive year. Indeed, what the English today are often most nostalgic for are traditions that go back no further than the nineteenth century. Nearly all of the current Christmas traditions, for instance, are examples of Victoriana.

But whether some or other Christmas custom was a Victorian invention does not much matter: what is important is how we continue to value these traditions and the ways in which they connect us with both the seasons and our communities, great and small. After all, the glorious poetry of the calendar resides precisely in its flaws, disparities, contradictions, and errors. Indeed, the drift of the Julian calendar (see Chapter 2) meant that even as it was still developing, the Christian calendar was already one day awry by AD 136, and a further day every 128 years or so after that. So the emergence of English folk traditions tied to saints’ days – such as rain on St Swithin’s Day meaning that it will rain for another forty days – took place at a time when the calendar was perpetually slipping, with the result that calendar-based traditions are not even stable relative to each other. But this, in all its glorious confusion, is what we have inherited, and it still resists every attempt to impose homogeneity upon it. For every year is different. We may have a dry or wet summer, a warm or chilly winter. Harvests may be bountiful or crops may fail. Easter, determined by calculations of hair-raising complexity (see Chapter 6), may fall early or late – and in doing so exerts a huge influence on how we lead our professional and personal lives.

Even now, in this age of all-year strawberries, of aggressively changing flora and fauna, of apocalyptic anxieties about extreme weather and ecological crisis, the calendar can provide reassurance; its rituals and rhythms can still help us to understand the natural world in more ‘natural’ ways, by which I mean more historical and more cultural ways.3 This is one of its many prodigious gifts, and so we must beware not to sentimentalize the land or fall victims to the nostalgia of the countryside. But if the seasons and the way we mark their progress do eventually become more remote and if we further loosen our cultural connections with them, what then? What will have been lost when we no longer hear the first cuckoo of spring, or even recognize the first flowers? The sobering answer is an immeasurable amount, and a large and vital part of ourselves. This book is first and foremost a celebration of England’s seasons; I hope that it does not also prove to be a memorial to them.