Crab & Bee's Matter of Britain: Mythlands of Albion, by Helen Billinghurst & Phil Smith

"This is an inspired retelling of some of the finest tales and tale tropes of England, at once very old and very modern"
Professor Ronald Hutton author of The Witch, Blood and Mistletoe and Pagan Britain

This book is also available to buy as a bundle with 6 postcards of Helen Billinghurst's paintings from the book. You can also buy the postcards on their own.

Crab & Bee have been gathering the ‘old stories’ for their new Matter of Britain, using the map of their own instincts, travelling on foot, and always ‘being there’.

These are not the stories of the medieval manuscripts, or their nationalist retellings for the BBC or the readership of the Times. This is how the old stories tell themselves these days, in their own places, the places where their genii loci dwell.

This is how the stories are heard by the bathers in the White Spring at Glastonbury, above the clatter and squeak of the amusements at Wookey Hole, from the bones of an auroch and the howling of hyenas in the neighbouring Gorge.

Familiar figures are there, like Godiva and Merlin, but there are also the stranger figures like those of Saint Senara, of Finny Gook and the bal maidens; the quiet characters of Britain’s hallucinations and dreams.

Crab & Bee’s new Matter of Britain is a banishing spell against nostalgia and a magical working for the remaking of the Matter in the ruins of the present, from the treasures of the past, speaking into the bodies of weird future.

"In the Matter of Britain, Crab and Bee appear to have casually gathered up the folk consciousness of Britain, laughed at it, stamped on it, and lovingly restored it to our modern landscape. But that might not be the truth of it. You will know many of these characters, and yet meet them for the first time. This is a folk masterpiece."
Lisa Schneidau - oral storyteller and author of the Folk Tales of Britain & Ireland series

"For those who do not recognise themselves in the narratives they have been told here is a new set of myths, ancient but future-orientated too. A hallucinatory journey through a re-imagined Albion and its landscapes. Origin stories for a people to come who are also already here. This book is as a series of images on cards passed quickly before the eyes. Both codex and a nesting of fictions – and a further move by the many against the one."
Professor Simon O’Sullivan - author of From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair

"Hallucinatory and hypnotic, grounded and earthy, this is a re-enchantment of the land, its past, present and future, with dirt beneath its nails."
Dr Katy Soar - Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology, University of Winchester

"Crab and Bee have this knack of coming at things out of left field, back to front, bottom up or inside out. On their psychic and physical peregrinations, the familiar becomes fantastic, grotesque, eldritch or wondrous, the fantastic and mythic revealed in the everyday. In the process they reveal the flecks of gold in the post-industrial muck"
John Constable aka John Crow, author of The Southwark Mysteries

This paperback book is 130 pages long, including 12 full-colour plates.