See the prologue to this version HERE.

The Nineteenth Century had a hard, cold ending. Across Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds the earth was like bell metal, water freezing deep in the ponds. It had been so for three weeks, and few could get any work. In Headington Quarry it had been a bleak Christmas, and the poor laws meant few could go on the parish, as once they might. And anyway, the workhouse would force the break up of families, which no man would countenance if he and his wife and children could but get through the next few weeks.

Billy Kimber was known to his friends as Merry, but there wasn't much to smile about that Christmas. Though he was no agricultural labourer but a skilled tradesman, there was no more work for him than for them, and he hadn't laid a brick, it seemed, for months. It was when he was sitting at odds with himself, fingering the keys of his concertina, that the thought came to him, they might dance round the great houses and collect what coppers they could, as they used to at Whitsun.

The village hadn't danced for many a long year, not in public anyway, and Boxing Day was all wrong, it being a spring custom, but Billy's dad had taught him the tunes, and that Mr Manning from the university had got Jim Hedges and Jack Harwood to persuade some of the old men, Bill Massey, John Simpkins, Bobby Cooper and “Black” Jack Haynes, to get together in the village hall the previous year, George Young playing the music, the first time they'd danced since 1888. Billy had been with them on that day, eleven years previous, though he'd only danced with them a year then. Mr Manning had even taken them up to Oxford, where they'd made the Corn Exchange ring with their bells and their capering. Billy's brother was one of the old dancers who went to the city, but he himself hadn't gone. Mark Cox had played, “a somewhat primitive fiddler”, in the words of the Oxford Chronicle.

His dad had told him of the grand old days, when as many as twenty sides would gather at the Kirtland Lamb Ale, competing for a cheese and ribbon. (A book of 1679 describes a Morris dance performed by men at this festival, followed by another by women.) Headington always won in those times, being the only one with sticks and jigs and draw-backs and set-back dances. Great days, now gone for ever, though it had been good, doing the old steps again, playing the old tunes.

Many of the young men had gone off, to serve with General Buller, fighting against the Boers, singing Goodbye Dolly, I Must Leave You, as they marched away in the scarlet and blue, their bayonets flashing in the sun, as the other song said. Billy hadn't gone with them, being a mature man of 27 summers, but there'd been some talk of white feathers in the village, and muttering that they wouldn't dance to his music, even if the side got going properly.

Billy's concertina wasn't accepted by all in the side, either, being somewhat new-fangled (patented in 1844 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, though the “anglo” Billy played was probably based on a patent of 1884), but he could do Laudnum Bunches, The Blue-Eyed Stranger, Constant Billy, Country Garden, Rigs of Marlow, How D'Ye Do Sir, Bean Setting, Haste To The Wedding, Rodney, Trunkles, what some called Trunk Hose, and Draw Back. But the side's fiddler, Mark Cox, had gone off for a servant's job at Magdalen College up at Oxford, so they'd have to follow along of Merry Kimber's squeezebox, with young William Washington, the well-digger, him they called Sip, playing the fool. Youngest dancer'd be Charlie Massey, a brickmaker like his father, William, both of them known rather confusingly by the same nickname – Mac – then the two Coppocks, George, known as Spuggle, and George, known as Curly, the latter with great ambitions, later fulfilled, to have a load of men working for his building business, Billy's brother, Richard Kimber, known as Dobbin, making a great career for himself as a worker with the local district council, John Ward, known as Waggle (and you'd soon know why, if you saw him dancing), a labourer, Jim Hedges, known as Gran, a laundry delivery man, and the oldest man in the side, 54-year-old John Horwood, whose brickmaking trade gave him his nickname of Brickdust.

Should be enough. They could start at Sandfield, where Mrs Birch and her family had lived for a couple of years. They had visitors in for Christmas, some said the young Miss Birch's husband had some sort of royal connections, might be good for a few pence.

Cecil Sharp's eyes had been giving him trouble. He suffered from what was popularly known as “gout of the eyes” (probably iritis), and he'd been known to roll on the floor in agony when the pain struck. On this Boxing Day he'd been wearing a shade to protect them from the glare of the snow, so that when he looked from his window that Boxing Day morning he wondered if they were playing him tricks. Ten men were coming up the drive, dressed outlandishly in white, covered with coloured ribbons. Latten-bells jingled on their shins as they walked. One, more outlandish even than the rest, appeared as he imagined a fool, or jester, might have looked in olden times. Yet here, on the eve of a new century, this vision from the middle ages, seemingly, was forming up in two lines of three, capering and waving handkerchiefs in the air, a young concertina player wheezing out a tune he didn't recognise while the fool or whatever he was whacked them with some kind of a bladder on a stick.

The kerchiefs were put away, and they produced sticks. And then a third dance. This time he thought he recognised the tune, one from Mr Gay's Beggars' Opera, and he wondered for a moment how it might have penetrated thus far from London – it never occurred to him that Gay's tune might have travelled to the capital from some village such as this – and he hurried on his clothes. He grabbed his notebook and ran almost headlong down the stairs and into the front garden, anxious to catch the concertina player before he left.

Billy eyed the tall, beak-nosed man with the kind and reddened eyes, a bit like Mister Punch in the stories, and he agreed to come back next day to let him note down the tunes. And they went on their way, well satisfied with the rewards the gentry folk had given the foreman of the side. There might be a decent plum duff on their tables this year after all, even though Christmas Day had been and gone.

Sharp was full of the experience over breakfast. He'd come into Oxfordshire looking for old songs, but this dancing was a new treasure he'd barely expected. The Beggars' Opera tune wasn't called Cease Your Funning (he'd remembered the name from the opera by now), but Constant Billy. And Country Garden stuck in his brain, so he kept humming it to himself through the day. He wondered if there were words to any of them.

He'd noted down one bit of doggerel they'd all sung together as they danced:

And a pair for they that come after.

A poor thing, but then dances hadn't usually had words to them since the days when ballad and ballet meant much the same thing, and carols were danced before the altar on Christmas Day.

But the talk was all of South Africa over the devilled kidneys and scrambled eggs, whether Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley would be relieved. The news in that day's Times was not good. There had been a terrible battle, where the Boers had lain in wait for a British artillery company, pouring down shot and shell upon them at a range of only a few hundred yards, capturing nine field guns. According to a Reuter report from the enemy camp, “Eleven Ambulances were at work in removing the British killed and wounded. So tremendous a cannonade has seldom been heard. The veldt for miles around was covered with dead and wounded.” The British admitted to 600 wounded, and were granted a 24-hour armistice to bury their dead. Boer losses were said to be 30 dead and wounded.

The Queen had asked for sizeable contributions “in order not only that assistance may be rendered to the sick and wounded on the field of battle, but also that assistance may be rendered to those who are disabled in after life, and succour offered to the women and children who may either be separated from their husbands and fathers or have to endure the great loss which makes them widows and orphans”.

United States shipping magnates paid for the USS Maine to be fitted out as a hospital ship and despatched to Cape Town to evacuate the wounded.

As a Christian socialist, Sharp's sympathies were with the Boer, of course, though he could not bruit such heterodox views around his pupils at Ludgrove, where he taught music. The one time he had done so, in the school common room, he had been left in a minority of one, and had almost been sent to Coventry by his fellow teachers. His political views, such as they were, were influenced more by William Morris and Charles Kingsley than by Karl Marx, of whom he'd never even heard.

And he'd not had much time for the church, until he met with Charles Marson, now curate in a Somerset parish, a thorn in the flesh of his superiors with his radical High Anglican socialism. According to Maud Karpeles, his secretary for many years, Sharp “was converted from indifference to Christianity by finding a parson on a gate telling fairy tales to children”. The parson was Marson, who had published a book of Faery Stories while still in Adelaide.

Sharp wrote to a friend in 1893: “The Christian Socialists are endeavouring to disseminate the grand and ideal truths of Socialism very wisely, as I think, leaving these principles to take concrete form themselves. Marson thinks you should begin by measures and work back to the underlying theories. We have had many an argument on this subject. To my mind the Fabians have lost all the power they had through tacking themselves on to the Liberal Party. Socialists should keep clear of politics for there is as much or as little Socialism in the Liberals as the Conservatives.” Nevertheless, he continued to support the Liberals for many years, and joined the Fabian Society in December 1900.

Marson and he had met in Adelaide, where Sharp's father, a slate merchant, had sent him to seek his fortune, and Marson was a local curate, at odds even then with his colonial bishop. Sharp had had a variety of jobs in Australia, even washing down hansom cabs when he first arrived, seeking his fortune. He'd worked as a bank clerk, but had been more interested in teaching violin, and was very unhappy until he was able to pursue his musical interests full time. Even at Clare College, where he'd secured a decent degree in maths, music had filled his mind and diverted his energies from study. He secured a position as an organist, pianist, conductor and then as a teacher at Adelaide College of Music, and was appointed music-master at Ludgrove, a preparatory school for Eton, after his return to England in 1892. He was 40 as the century turned, father of three fine girls and one boy.

The company chaffed him, being himself a teacher, at his fear that education and the railways would kill the last vestiges of what the Germans were calling volkskultur, before he got a chance to note it all down.

“You ought to have noted down the dances as well as the tunes,” said Mrs Birch, his mother-in-law. “It might have done wonders for your asthma, to go out with them of a Boxing Day morning.”

“If it's not a waltz, then Cecil isn't interested,” said another, for Sharp was a skilled ballroom dancer. “Or the ballet,” said another, “as long as he doesn't have to go up sur les pointes!” And they all laughed.

The day passed, as house parties will, and he thought little more of Billy Kimber and his concertina, though he kept his notes carefully, as he did all his collection, as he was beginning to think of them. Though he had hoped to travel down to Hambridge to see his old friend, he didn't get to stay with Charles Marson until four years later, in the summer of 1903. The Boer War had ended the previous May, 28,000 British names being inscribed on the village war memorials (which omitted the 20,000 Boer civilians who died in the British concentration camps, nor yet the 12,000 black auxiliaries on both sides, who had also died; the Boers themselves lost only four thousand men).

Marson shared Sharp's interest in what was now being called folksong. The British interpretation lacked the German concept of das volk, though Sharp later drew a Germanic distinction between “national” song, like the tunes of Charles Dibdin, and folksong: “the one is individual, the other communal and racial”. But gems were hard to come by. Marson wrote later: “The folk-song is like the duck-billed platypus in this particular, you can live for years within a few yards of it and never suspect its existence.” This was only partly because “folk-song, unknown in the drawing-room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle classes, and despised by those who have been uneducated into the three R's, takes refuge in the fastnesses of tap-rooms, poor cottages and outlying hamlets”, where royal music teachers and anglo-catholic clergy were hardly likely to penetrate.

Little did Marson realise that a platypus was living in his own village, tending his garden.

It was a Saturday in late August, 1903, and Sharp was sunning himself in a deckchair on the lawn. A gardener was mowing the grass close by. Marson and Mattie Kay, a singer with a bonnie contralto voice, were beside him, sipping from their teacups.

Suddenly, Sharp hushed them, with a finger to his lips. They sat silent, while the old man continued his gardening, unaware of the attention they were giving him.

He sang quietly to himself:

Till I gained the willow tree.

Time rolled back. Shades of Ophelia sang of rosemary and rue, herb o' grace, and fennel and columbines. Here was flower imagery that had survived since Shakespeare, when all the groundlings would have caught the references in the Hamlet mad scene. With Marson's agreement, Sharp approached the man and asked him to sing the song again.

He put by his scythe, and sang it with his eyes gazing out into space, not performing as if to an audience, but like someone recalling an old memory:

Till I gained the willow tree.

And then he smiled at the three listeners, like one who had returned from a dream, and repeated the first line: “I sowed the seeds of love.”

Sharp had it all in his notebook. “I shall harmonise the tune,” he said, “and you, Mattie, shall sing it tonight.

“By the way, Marson, what is the gardener's name? I forgot to ask.”

“John England.”