It was a romantic revolution, conducted by such unlikely comrades in arms as the music tutor to England's next two kings, an Oxfordshire bricklayer, a descendant of the Wedgwood pottery family, old and sick inmates of workhouses and similar institutions, the philanthropist daughter of a Birmingham button-maker, a group of East End seamstresses, and incumbents of English vicarages across the land. Like Moses, they didn't know where they were going, and they never saw their Promised Land.

They thought they were gathering the last leaves of a long harvest that had begun in prehistoric times. Everyone from Karl Marx to the Archbishop of Canterbury “knew” that in just a few years it would be too late to harvest anything more from this dying culture. They thought the best they could do would be to preserve the old songs and dances of Merrie England for the delectation of the “lettered classes”. But what they were doing and what they found changed the face of music throughout the world.

Against all the odds, people still dance the old dances and sing the old songs, probably more of them than ever before in history. And the tale is not yet told in full, nor is it likely ever to be, since it depicts a continuing struggle to assert human identity in a world whose thrust towards globalisation was just beginning when the royal music tutor looked out of a window to see an out-of-work bricklayer dancing in an Oxfordshire garden in 1899.

It is a story which moves from polite tea parties to the stews of East London, from village taverns to the Royal Albert Hall, from the West End and Broadway stage to the mud of war-torn Flanders.

The unlikely revolutionaries included:

• The Royal music tutor, Cecil Sharp, who went on to collect songs and dances in England and America, and to present dances on the stage in both countries.
• The bricklayer, Billy Kimber, who became a darling of the British establishment, though all he was paid for his efforts was half a sovereign (50p).
• The descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was inspired by the songs he heard to become the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, whose party piece was a music-hall song, When Father Papered the Parlour.
• The button-maker's daughter, Clara Sophia (“Sister Mary”) Neal, who caught TB while teaching East End girls how to make a living by sewing for the rich. And who took Billy Kimber's dances and taught them across the world.
• The East End seamstress, Florrie Warren, who found herself walking down New York's Great White Way, on the way to showing the Americans how to dance.
• Clergy like Father Charles Marson, the Christian socialist High Anglican whose gardener taught Cecil Sharp his first folk song, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, collector of limericks who censored the “indelicate” words from the songs people sang him, and not forgetting Conrad Noel, vicar of Thaxted, who placed a red flag beside the Cross on his altar.
• The hundreds of thousands of singers and dancers who were fed into the meatgrinder of the Somme, some of them named, like “the most promising composer of his generation”, George Butterworth, who had burned all his older compositions before signing up to go to war, but also many others whose names are only carved on village war memorials.
• And the women who took up where the men had left off, and carried the tradition on, against all odds.

It is a story of death and resurrection, of the triumph of life over death, of music over money.