CHRIS WOOD is a musician on a mission. The man from Kent wants to teach the English their story by reaching the parts the national curriculum does not reach.

So he sings about the peasant poet John Clare who was so poor he was not worth the clay he stood upon. Yet he is remembered because his empathy with the land inspired countless poems, until his muse was fenced in by the Enclosure Acts and he ended up in a lunatic asylum.

John Ball, the hedgerow priest hanged by Richard II for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, inspires another song, as does Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent young Brazilian shot dead by police officers at Stockwell Tube Station – two victims of authority separated by centuries.

The epic ballads Lord Bateman and One In A Million celebrate the tenacity of love, while The Cottager’s Reply takes a bucolic swipe at 4x4-driving urbanites seeking a Cotswold retreat.

My Darling’s Downsized is a paean for middle-aged love, while the mystery of fatherhood is explored in Hard, which Wood wrote about his precocious daughter.

Wood enthralled a full house with his singing and deft guitar playing, and there were no microphones to separate him from the audience who sang many a chorus enthusiastically.

He broke out his fiddle for True North, the song about Clare, and showed wonderful dexterity by plucking two fiddles to accompany a song rooted in the Appalachian Mountains.

Wood reached another peak with his powerful atheist gospel song Come Down Jehovah, which he wrote in little over an hour and is causing ripples in the folk fraternity.