This charming history of metalwork and blacksmithing features many traditional stories and folk tales surrounding the ancient craft. Frederick W. Robbins shares many customs, traditions, stories, and historical anecdotes regarding ancient smithwork in this captivating volume. The Smith is a wonderful book for those who are interested in blacksmithing and wish to know more about the folklore and myths surrounding the craft. First published in 1953. The contents of this volume feature: - The Primitive Smith - The Magic Metal - Smith Clans and Castes - Hephaestus, the Smith-God - Wayland, the Hero-Smith - The Magic Sword - Gobha, the Celtic Smith

A “vigorous and vivid and feisty” portrait of a traditional Scottish subculture from an insider (Dundee Courier & Advertiser). Scottish gypsies, known as travellers, have wandered Scotland’s roads and byways for centuries, and their turbulent history is captured in this passionate book by Jess Smith, the bestselling author of Jessie’s Journey. This is less a conventional history than a personal pilgrimage through the stories, songs, and culture of a people for whom freedom is more important than security and a campfire under the stars is preferable to a warm hearth within stone walls. Settled society has always discriminated against travellers, and Jess tells shocking stories of bullying, violence, the enforced break-up of families, and separate schooling. But drawing on her own and her family’s experiences, she also captures the magic and drama of days wandering the roads and working the land, and brings to life the travellers’ rich and vibrant traditions.

The Social Topography of a Rural Community is a micro-history of an exceptionally well-documented seventeenth-century English village: Chilvers Coton in north-eastern Warwickshire. Drawing on a rich archive of sources, including an occupational census, detailed estate maps, account books, private journals, and hundreds of deeds and wills, and employing a novel micro-spatial methodology, it reconstructs the life experience of some 780 inhabitants spread across 176 households. This offers a unique opportunity to visualize members of an English rural community as they responded to, and in turn initiated, changes in social and economic activity, making their own history on their own terms. In so doing the book brings to the fore the social, economic, and spatial lives of people who have been marginalized from conventional historical discourse, and offers an unusual level of detail relating to the spatial and demographic details of local life. Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the contributions and experiences of a particular household in the parish-the mill, the vicarage, the alehouse, the blacksmith's forge, the hovels of the labourers and coalminers, the cottages of the nail-smiths and ribbon-weavers, the farms of the yeomen and craftsmen, and the manor house of Arbury Hall itself-locating them precisely on specific sites in the landscape and the built environment; and sketching the evolving 'taskscapes' in which the inhabitants dwelled. A novel contribution to spatial history, as well as early modern material, social and economic history more generally, this study represents a highly original analysis of the significance of place, space, and flow in the history of English rural communities.

Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual behavior. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade follows the ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, adventures rooted in the people's awareness of an awesome new power. The new edition of The Forge and the Crucible contains an updated appendix, in which Eliade lists works on Chinese alchemy published in the past few years. He also discusses the importance of alchemy in Newton's scientific evolution.