Liege & Lief

Boyd produced the album for Witchseason Productions at Sound Techniques in London, with John Wood as engineer. The material was rehearsed over the summer of 1969 at Farley Chamberlayne. Hutchings later called it a magical time. The covers of Dylan and others were gone. In their place were electrified versions of traditional British songs such as Matty Groves and Tam Lin, new compositions with a traditional feel, and an instrumental medley of folk dance tunes driven by Swarbrick's fiddle. Hutchings found much of the traditional material in the collection kept by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, though Swarbrick has claimed credit as the source.

The title joins two Middle English words, liege for loyal and lief for ready. The grey and purple gatefold sleeve carried illustrated vignettes on ten aspects of English traditional music and folklore, from the Padstow hobby-horse to the collectors Francis James Child and Cecil Sharp. The band toured the UK and Denmark with the material before recording it. Hutchings and Denny both quit in November 1969, before the album came out.

The album spent fifteen weeks on the UK chart and peaked at number 17. John Peel promoted it on Top Gear. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn recommended it only to devotees of quietly arty traditional folk. Patrick Humphries, writing in 1996, called "Farewell, Farewell" a flawless example of what the band could do at their peak. Mojo placed it at number 58 in its 2007 list of 100 records that changed the world. Listeners to BBC Radio 2 voted it the most important folk album of all time in 2002, and at the 2006 Folk Awards it won Most Influential Folk Album of All Time.