The inspiration for this project has come from the pioneering work of George Ewart Evans (1909-88). Evans was a schoolteacher, writer and folklorist who became a dedicated collector of oral history and oral tradition in the East Anglian countryside from the 1940s to the 1970s. He produced 11 books of collections of these materials. His work in collecting the stories and memories of the old Suffolk horsemen provided the springboard for this project. In particular he attempted to uncover the tangled web of myth, magic, superstition and ritual as practiced by the legendary horsemen of East Anglia.
Evans concentrated his attention on the Suffolk horsemen and their famous Suffolk punches (a breed specifically developed to work the heavy clay soils of that region.
The Horseman’s Word project has extended this exploration to document the Fenland horsemen, and their traditional breeds: the Shire, the Percheron, and the Clydesdale.
Three poems, in Modern Welsh Poetry (ed. Keidrych Rhys)
(Faber, London 1944).
The Voices of the Children (Penmark Press, 1947).
Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay (Faber 1956).
Welsh Short Stories (Ed. G. E. Evans, with his own story,
The Medal) (Faber 1959, 2nd Edn.).
The Horse in the Furrow (Faber 1960).
The Pattern Under the Plough: Aspects of the Folk-Life of East Anglia (Faber 1966).
The Farm and the Village (Faber 1969).
Where Beards Wag All: The Relevance of the Oral Tradition
(Faber 1970).
The Leaping Hare (George Ewart Evans and David Thomson)
(Faber 1972).
Acky (Faber 1973).
The Days That We Have Seen (Faber 1975).
Let Dogs Delight and Other Stories (Faber 1975)
From Mouths Of Men (Faber 1976).
Horse Power and Magic (Faber 1979).
The Strength of the Hills: An Autobiography (Faber 1983;
Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York).
Spoken History (Faber 1987).
The Crooked Scythe. An Anthology of Oral History (Ed. and ill.
David Gentleman, (Faber 1993)
The George Ewart Evans collection online BBC.