Books Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britainby Zakia Sewell
Hodder Press 2026
Of course we wouldn’t have been able to resist a book with a title like this one. It is important to note, however, that Sewell does not use the term ‘Albion’ in the England-focussed sense of George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (which inspired the naming of this magazine in 2004). In her book it means the wider, more authentic self of Britain in general, a self which— it is argued—has been occluded for centuries by the distortions of Enclosure, industrialisation and imperialism, and is now beginning to struggle out from underneath these layers in a variety of surprising ways. Although the chapters on folkways in Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales are just as fascinating and moving as the sections on England, this review will concentrate on the latter.
Sewell acknowledges that for a variety of reasons, English cultural identity presents a particularly thorny problem compared to the other constituent nations of Great Britain. She notes that the name ‘Albion’ “has an enduring association with England in particular” and “England’s identity is also far more enmeshed with Britishness than its sister nations.” and while it is often said nowadays that Great Britain is in search of a meaningful and appropriate national narrative, this appears to be most critically the case for England. Alarmed by the current vacuum, Sewell ventures forth on a journey of cultural excavation, investigating various historically important places, attending traditional folk events, and following the wheel of the pagan year in order to present England with a mostly-forgotten version of itself.
Taking as her inspiration William Blake’s legend of the Giant Albion, who (of course) is merely sleeping and whose awakening will one day herald the New Jerusalem, Sewell aims “to re-enchant the present.” The author’s family background provides a unique perspective on this project of investigating England’s hidden selves and cultural connections with the outside world: with roots in the English hippy communities of West Wales on the one side and the tiny Grenadian island of Carriacou on the other, she is particularly attuned to older English cultures. Her Caribbean heritage motivates her quest to unearth a pre-imperialist England with which she can more easily identify than the institutions involved in the oppression of her ancestors. However, she compellingly argues that we are all in need of a cultural rewind and reset. Throughout, Finding Albion hearkens back to previous upsurges of healing cultural nostalgia, a very English reflex that includes Victorian utopianism —Robert Blatchford’s “Merrie England” fantasy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, etc — and of course, most particularly, the sixties pagan and folk revival. Ultimately, Sewell’s book underscores the nationally existential importance of a comprehensive historical understanding. Without real knowledge of (in particular) imperial history and its legacies or English rural and radical history, all of which are neglected in schools, it will be impossible to forge a meaningful cultural and civic identity or to understand England’s relationships with the outside world.
Sewell’s quest germinated when, as a teenager, she was taken to a Pentangle concert by her father and heard the exquisite folksong The Cuckoo. As she notes, the English folk song canon offers “an alternative history of the nation,” preserving episodes of resistance against dispossession and oppression that have universal resonance. During a visit to Rufford Park, Nottinghamshire, she muses on Enclosure and its devastating impact on England and its regional cultural expressions. She highlights the oddity of the modern English rural fantasy, a largely depopulated landscape “where the working people are either absent or airbrushed beyond recognition.” The cultural persistence of the rural idyll is psychoanalysed here “as a persistent and unfulfilled desire to ‘go back’ to Old England,” a direct consequence of the kind of oppression outlined in the folk song The Rufford Park Poachers, which memorialises an 1851 battle between gamekeepers and poachers and the latter's struggle for “‘poor men’s rights’” against the ‘rich man’s laws’” during the Poaching Wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new ‘anti-poaching’ laws which reserved the right to hunt solely to landowners were merely the latest instalment in a legislative series that, over the centuries, had increasingly tightened pressure on rural communities attempting to feed themselves from the land. While the Norman Forest Laws removed common rights to woodlands by turning them into private hunting preserves for the Crown and aristocracy, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII opened the door for rapacious new landowners and damaging conflicts between them and the established aristocracy. Rural England’s sweeping landscapes and parks largely free of people were often created intentionally by means (for example) of razing villages and displacing their inhabitants. As Sewell notes dryly, it is “curious that the manicured parklands and gilded chambers of the aristocracy have somehow become intertwined with our collective sense of self,” but this appears to be a fairly new cultural development, a reaction to England’s sense of geopolitical dislocation following the Second World War (and interrogated previously, of course, by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day).
Sewell suggests that a ruling-class misanthropy underwrote both the later Enclosure Acts and the colonialist system of exploitation that formed the crucible of modern racism, and shows how the two were economically bound together: “Between 1750 and 1820 over 21 per cent of England was enclosed, often funded by wealth accumulated by investing in colonial enterprises.” The reverberations of Enclosure are still felt today in all the Keep Out signs, but the impact has been much deeper than that. Nadia Shaikh, a campaigner for the right to roam from Jarrow, observes that “Before mass enclosure, each village or region would have had different stories, different dialects and a different sense of self generally” and that Enclosure contributed to a “homogenisation of Englishness.” There is no doubt that Enclosure resulted in a devastating loss of culture as well as of place, but Shaikh believes that it also caused a collective loss of confidence on the part of the dispossessed, eliminating the belief —still very robust in Scotland— in shared rights to the countryside and “memories of the collective ways of living together.” Sewell comments that this feeling of separation from local roots and landscapes makes it difficult to develop a grounded sense of national identity.
While it is never made explicit, her narrative sets up an intriguing contrast between the loss of rural English folk cultures on the one hand and the cultural individuality of Caribbean villages on the other, which have often preserved or reinvented English folkways (a Jack in the Green covered with coconut leaves; maypole dancing; mummers’ plays involving the usual suspects such as St George and St David but in one particular case, Shakespeare passages as well), and combined them with West African traditions. Colonial-era cultural borrowing was a two-way street, so that English folk culture became deeply permeable to global influences: to take one well-known example, call-and-response sea shanties such as the monumental Shallow Brown are rooted in West African work songs. Sewell’s examination of old English folk songs’ preservation in the Caribbean, currently being investigated by the young scholar and musician Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, suggests that much can be learnt about the country’s former folk cultures by engaging with their survivals in far-flung parts of the former Empire.
These have been brought back to England by the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of emancipation deriving from Trinidadian carnival traditions which reflects Caribbean cultural fusion on a massive scale. Sewell outlines the carnival’s history: originally founded by activist Claudia Jones to raise local spirits after the Notting Hill Riots of 1958, it was subsequently revived in 1966 as the Notting Hill Fayre by the radical London Free School, in an incarnation equally inspired by Caribbean carnivals and a somewhat psychedelic interpretation of London’s mediaeval fairs, most of which had been phased out in the nineteenth century. Rhaune Laslett, who masterminded this version, was inspired by a dream of togetherness which resulted in the 1966 event being “a heady blend of old English traditions, hippy counterculture, and…Caribbean ‘folk origins.’” This chapter was sadly short-lived, as racial hostility forced the Caribbean community to retrench, but it remains a poignant example of a road not taken, one which makes Sewell particularly wistful.
An equally thought-provoking chapter finds the author in York at Samhain on the trail of the famous Ivory Bangle Lady, an elite North-African descended inhabitant of Roman York (a discovery which, considering the history of the Roman Empire, should not have been at all surprising). Here Sewell ponders the Gothic, the particular English cultural obsession with ghosts and hauntings which, she believes, is the expression of various traumas denied, “half-forgotten hurts that haunt the nation” in messages from “restless ancestors who poke and pester” —just as they do on her maternal island Carriacou, notably the ‘Old Parents,’ the original trafficked ancestors from West Africa who are remembered, honoured and comforted in drum ceremonies. Sewell suggests that this English cultural fixation on the supernatural is tied to an unexplored imperial history, an enormous hinterland in the nation’s peripheral vision containing real but largely unacknowledged horror, and evokes Jane Eyre’s attic inhabitant in passing. She reveals that the prolific ghost-story writer M. R. James, whose narratives revolve around historical artefacts possessed by malevolent forces which --unlocked by an invariably clueless, donnish main character apparently modelled on James himself-- suddenly irrupt into the present, was descended from one of Jamaica’s oldest slave-owning dynasties: the family at one point owned 3,160 people. The warnings in his stories not to “go digging” into the past take on an entirely new significance in this context (like his compulsion to write horror stories in the first place), but Sewell argues that continuing to repress this history, as James did on a personal level, cannot help but weigh the nation down. In this chapter, she evokes the business of history as communion with ghosts and highlights some isolated attempts to let this history speak, such as Angeline Morrison’s beautiful and extraordinary album The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience.
One of the last ten years’ most unexpected developments has been the revival of interest in folk culture and paganism to the point where these once niche scenes have gone mainstream: the female Boss Morris troupe’s eerie performance at the Brit Awards in 2023, the upsurge of popular interest in folk horror, and the Green Man’s prominent placement on the Coronation invitations. English folk music now attracts youngsters from many different backgrounds who find it overall more open than a modern culture complicated by the imperial legacy and class. Pagan equinox and solstice ceremonies increasingly draw large, diverse crowds, and this revival of paganism as a fashionable interest is obviously a distinct relief to Sewell, who drolly explains that she had to keep her fascination for it quiet in the censorious Grime and Drill scenes of her early youth. Some people of Caribbean ancestry have recently discovered a deeply meaningful resonance between English paganism and ancestral West African belief systems, a path to reversing the religious and cultural repression by colonial governments that had echoed the earlier, similar movement in early modern England: “paganism offers a way back to…..forms of knowledge we’ve been severed from —both here in Britain and across the former empire.” Although some of her reflections on paganism are just a little reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek instructions in Ride A White Swan by T. Rex, Sewell’s encounters make clear that today’s enthusiasts derive meaning from these old/new spiritual practices.
Throughout her various excursions into folk culture Sewell features fascinating interviews with figures involved in the current revival, such as Alex Merry of Boss Morris, who comments that dancing up the sunrise on May Day “feels like we’re digging down into another reality, to a magical layer of England.” Sewell feels that Morris dancing and other English folk customs “offer up a vision of Englishness that feels more inclusive than some of the country’s other national symbols and traditions….weird, homegrown and DIY, by the people and for the people.” In her historical overview of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folk revival she diagnoses a durable tendency to focus too heavily on figures such as Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger, with their deeply problematic racial attitudes, and less on figures like Mary Neal, the suffragette who set up a club for working-class women in King’s Cross in 1895 and taught them Morris dancing to raise morale, with astonishing success, leading to the dance’s first major revival. (Neal believed that this type of communal dancing “was mystically linked to an older, kinder, more equitable English past.”) Sewell asks pointedly whether Sharp’s attitudes encouraged him to deliberately omit from his collecting “customs and traditions that showed evidence of interplay, fusion and exchange.” It is worth noting other modern distortions of English folk tradition, such as the introduction of black-face to Morris dancing in the nineteenth century, a byproduct of the popular-culture craze for American minstrel acts.
Today’s enthusiasm for folk culture is fuelled by a longing for festivity and community. (As one enthusiast of English social dancing poignantly comments, it allows us to hold hands with other people.) It thereby kills two birds with one stone —at once a partial answer to the loneliness epidemic, and a constructive attempt to deal with contemporary questions of identity and belonging. Sewell reminds us that we can blame the Puritans for initiating a centuries-long assault on traditional merry-making opportunities and thereby strengthening the tendency to melancholy for which the national temperament is famous. Nowadays, by contrast, young people are busily engaged in inventing their own community ‘traditions,’ many of which express an anarchic, whimsical spirit, “a mischievous unruliness that refuses to conform” reminiscent of the sixties, and which seem to be highly successful in finding their participants new friends. (Sewell notes that in wintertime, half of her social circle seems to be starting up new wassailing events.) It is impossible to read her accounts of these improvised, chaotic, larky community events without being cheered.
As the foregoing suggests, Sewell’s book ultimately has more to offer England than the Union’s other, less precariously-grounded members. It suggests that England’s separation from itself can ultimately be undone by investigating history in depth, connecting with local places and the natural world, and exploring folk culture in its wider context: England’s cultural enmeshing with other British nations and the former Empire. In the folk tradition she sees the opportunity to unearth “the nation’s magic, its eccentricity, its radical heart,” and senses that --as it did for those 1960s poets and artists who were equally inspired by Blake— “The spirit of Albion is stirring beneath the soil: a different story, a different way of being, right here, where you stand.” This is, doubtless, heady stuff. Whether her programme will ultimately enable England to integrate its considerable historical contradictions and overcome the present dysfunctional moment remains to be seen, but the new England may just turn out to be a very old one, hiding in plain sight all the time.--Isabel Taylor
