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Fish House Blues

from Fish House Blues by Daniel Shaw

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Meare Fish House is a unique monument. It stands as the Stewards house in a complex that once had fish ponds, orchards and vines. The Orchards remain and the ponds are drained. The Abbot’s Palace is adjacent to the house and is more like a ‘Hall’ design. The fish house is perhaps the first ‘Modern’ house with multiple rooms and two levels that we would recognise. Local landholders appear in the doomsday book. Rent was paid in eels and ‘wall-fish’ – snails were collected on Fridays by children in buckets to eat in lieu of fish – given dispensation by the pope. Lines of Willows were once cut to make the straps to hold thatch on the roofs of the cottages in the village. 4000-year-old evidence of habitation has been found in ‘island’ the village which matches the earliest part of two known lake village sites – (and local trackways stretching back 6000 years) used for summer hunting from antiquity up to the time of the Romans use of the area for connecting the spoils of mining the Mendips and further South West (the Shapwick Villa).

The mediaeval landscape was shaped, and drained, (moving rivers to change fishing rights) by the two rival centres of Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral.
On a clear day, you can glimpse the cathedral shining in the sun from the path that runs through the Meare farm that is the Abbot’s great hall. The area is rich in finds and history. From one window of my house, you can see the fish house and from another, you can ake out Glastonbury Tor).

lyrics

From the window of my home
Where I’ve lived for13 Springs
Stands a house all alone
With fields and meadows in rings
-And it’s stood for the best part of a thousand years
While the world all around it has grown in fear

And come the night
We’ll all be singing
And come the night
We’ll all be longing
For the Fish House blues

There’s still an orchard
Where there used to be some vines
They used to fish
In the Lake that’s drained behind
-Kings used to visit with the Monks in a boat
Reeds are still waving but now commoners got the vote

Knights and Landholders
Were written in the book
Jack fingers took the rent
In eels caught to cook
- Doulting Stones standing on the Lyme
Secrets of the Roman Reich buried and left to find (with the pools and the Pike)

Belief builds the stones
And belief pulls them down
It all left its mark
On the brow of this town
- Willows bend and sway in lines left to root
But thatch is now tiled up tooth to tooth

credits

from Fish House Blues, released April 20, 2021

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Daniel Shaw Glastonbury, UK

Daniel Shaw based in Glastonbury & S.W.area.
Past work includes performances with the poet Laureate, Simon Armitage; & performances in Europe, Tennessee, Kolkatta and the Uk.
Daniel has also performed and recorded with the The Aardvarks, double bass & Bass with Mossflower, The Minor Works Unit, Mr Keep Calm & The Cancelled Cheques, The Blackdown Bluebirds andThe Duncan Batey Trio. ... more

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