ABSTRACT
Apocryphal accounts, if not rigorous historical research, has it that, in 1781, when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, the British military band in attendance played the tune, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’: either way, it would not be out of place today. It was, then, a lament for the strategic failure which the ceremony formalised, but it was also, in its origins which date back to the 1640s, a protest ballad against the (Cromwellian) destruction of favourite English Christmas traditions. In no small way it was a song expressing a longing for, or celebration of, inversions of the established order. It was not out of place then, and it is as apt today in a world in which inversions abound.
