Robins at the Abbey/Stowaways at the Abbey

I’ve got a few of these books by Elsie J Oxenham, collecting them randomly in the same way as I collect other British Girls’ Stories of the 1920-1950 period. They’re a little slice of history, where the pinnacle of life is to marry and have sets of twins (in Robins, one poor damsel has two sets in one year!) and where there’s an impassable gap between the working and the landed classes. These stories are set near an old Abbey, where discoveries are made such as buried bells, loot from highwaymen, collapsed tunnels and the like. The girls all attend an English Dancing club and have very mild adventures. These two volumes – where one female Robin meets a male Robin and fall in love, or where a boot-boy is a stowaway in the Abbey and is reconciled to his master by one of the girls – are fairly tame, especially as most of the action is “off-camera” and is just retold by one girl to another, interspersed with announcements of more twins. They are nothing to the Chalet School, where the girls have a constant brush with death every other chapter, but as a piece of history they’re fairly interesting.