As we reach the end of our hectic first year, may I on behalf of the Penland Phezants wish all our listeners (including the 70 more lovely people who helped bring alive our True Story of Hereward the Wake at Elmswell History group at our last gig of the year last night!) A Very Happy Christmas and a Brand New Year.
Press Release: A Lynn Carol
Sedgeford folk music-storytelling combo The Penland Phezants have released a Christmas carol especially for and about Lynn. The carol embraces the timeless message of Christmas by linking Lynn across 600 years.
The writer of the first autobiography in English the mystic Margery Kempe lived all her life on the Lynn waterfront at the turn of the 15C. In her "Book of Margery Kempe", she describes many extraordinary visions of love and joy including one in which she hears the Holy Ghost as a robin redbreast singing merrily in her right ear!
The Phezants bring this story timelessly into the present amid the Christmas rush as follows.
Now starry angels on the tree
Grow larger in the dusk
To heaven-blue and Eden-green
And gold and reindeer-musk.
And what was heard by Margery,
The Visionary of Lynn,
Rings out on tills for checkout girls
Who hear that robin sing.
Grow larger in the dusk
To heaven-blue and Eden-green
And gold and reindeer-musk.
And what was heard by Margery,
The Visionary of Lynn,
Rings out on tills for checkout girls
Who hear that robin sing.
The only gift left on the shelf,
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
The carol was enjoyed by a packed Lynn Minster when it was performed by a full cast as part of "Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe" last September.
The CD "Songs for Skirting Heresy" with songs (including the two featured here) about Lynn through the ages is on sale at True's Yard fisherfolk museum or online at:
