This suite is Britten's second original composition after his heart surgery of 1973. He had suffered a stroke during the course of the operation. The resulting depression nearly convinced him that he could not compose, but friends gently drew him back to composition, which vastly improved his outlook.

By the summer of 1974, Britten was looking forward to a reasonable recovery. Having edged back into musical work by making revisions and orchestrations of earlier music, he composed The Death of St. Narcissus for his friends tenor Peter Pears and harpist Osian Ellis. Then, while most of his closest friends including Pears went to New York to prepare the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Death in Venice Britten went with his nurse Rita Thompson to stay at Wolfsgarten, the estate of his friend Peg Hesse (that is, Margaret, Princess of Hesse and the Rhine).

At that point his was in the preliminary stages of planning a children's miracle play on the Christmas story (hoping to provide his current publisher, Faber Music, with a cash cow on the order of Noye's Fludde, which provided a reliable cash flow for his old publisher, Boosey and Hawkes). But Donald Mitchell of Faber had also spoken to Britten about an interesting little orphan in his catalog, a wind band snipped based on the English folk song "Hankin Booby." Britten wrote it in 1966 for the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. As Mitchell explains, "In its solitary state there was not much of a future for [Hankin Booby]; and we often talked about the possibility of creating a context for it. This suite served that function, but the children's opera never materialized.

In this suite Britten does much more than just arrange and orchestrate folk songs. For the most part the songs are only partly quoted, then developed. Each of the five movements is named after a particular song:

1. Cakes and Ale

2. The bitter whey

3. Hankin Booby

4. Hunt the squirrel

5. Lord Melbourne.

Each is actually based on two songs, either collected at the beginning of the century, or found in the venerable Playford's Dancing Master.

The suite is the first large work Britten composed originally for orchestra since A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946). It is very different in mood, being, in its first four movements, either gruff or bitter in tone. He gave the work its title after a line in Thomas Hardy's Winter Words.

He wrote to Pears in America on November 17 that he had completed the work. The last movement, based on a lovely song found by Percy Grainger, is in a completely different mood: radiantly calm and resigned, it slips away peacefully at the end. Nurse Thompson said that it was at the beginning of November that Britten reached the "point of acceptance" that his physical condition would never improve. One cannot escape feeling that in this touching conclusion Britten foresaw his own death. The suite was premiered in the 1975 Aldeburgh Festival.

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