A Health to Field and Hearth

“A Health to Field and Hearth” is an original, historically inspired English broadside-style ballad imagining the music of a prosperous yeoman household. With rustic fiddle, Renaissance cittern and communal voices, the song celebrates the rhythms of rural life: ploughing and harvest, market journeys, bread and cheese by the fire, friendship between neighbours, Sunday worship and gratitude to God for the land that sustained them. The accompanying artwork recreates Old Basing in the visual character of a seventeenth-century English or Anglo-Dutch oil painting, bringing the household and its musicians gently to life. This is a historically plausible artistic reconstruction, not a surviving seventeenth-century song.