The fifth volume in this annotated collection of texts relating to the 'progresses' of Queen Elizabeth I around England provides 26 appendices, a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and the index to Volumes I to V.
" In the year of Our Lord 1492, thirty-nine years after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks and eighteen years after the establishment of Caxton's printing press, one Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor, set sail from Spain with the laudable object of converting the Khan of Tartary to the Christian Faith, and on his way discovered the continent of America. The islands on which Columbus first landed and the adjacent stretch of mainland from Mexico to Patagonia which the Spaniards who followed him colonized lay outside the territory which is now known as the United States. Nevertheless the instinct of the American democracy has always looked back to him as a sort of ancestor, and popular American tradition conceives of him as in some shadowy fashion a founder. And that instinct and tradition, like most such national instincts and traditions, is sound...."
"'Folksongs' interest many people nowadays, because they are meant to be the kinds of songs most of our ancestors sang, before industrialisation, before the mass media, before music and song became commodities, and before all the assorted evils associated with advanced capitalist society. 'Folksongs' and 'ballads' represent real values something honest and straightforward and beautiful to hang on to, and make us feel our roots in the Britain of 1900 or 1800 or even 1700. The only problem with this way of thinking is that it is based on myths. What we now know as 'folksongs' and 'ballads' were sought after, collected, edited and published by individuals who were either members of the rising bourgeoisie, or were ideologically sympathetic to bourgeois culture and values. The working people who sang their songs, and had them chopped up, amended and sometimes re-written or invented on their behalf, are remarkably absent from the story of 'folksong'. Before we can begin to piece together the real history of our ancestors' culture, we have to penetrate the 'mediations' of people like Cecil Sharp, Francis James Child and Albert Lancaster Lloyd, and to begin building again on firmer foundations. This book sets out to clear the ground"--Page 4 of cover.