Customs in Common, page 60
G. Roberts, The History and Antiquities of Lyme Regis and Charmouth (1834), pp. 256-61.
See e.g. N & Q, 4th series, xi (1873), p. 455, referring to an occasion in Bermondsey (London) “about thirty years ago”.
J. S. Udal, Dorsetshire Folklore (Hertford, 1922), pp. 195-6, citing the Bridport News, Nov. 1884.
So much for the forms. More could be said. And more has been said. Unfortunately, those nineteenth-century folklorists to whom we are indebted for many of the best accounts of these rituals were interested, in the main, in the forms themselves; and, if they went further, it was most often to speculate upon their origin and relationship, to classify the forms according to a sort of human botany. Admirably-observed accounts of the form may include only the most casual, throw-away, allusion to the occasion for the event: the status of the victims, their supposed offence, the consequence of the rough music.
Nevertheless, before proceeding, let us see what evidence is offered to us from the forms themselves.
1) The forms are dramatic: they are a kind of “street theatre”. As such, they are immediately adapted to the function of publicising scandal. Moreover, the dramatic forms are usually processional. Perhaps one should say, indeed, that they are anti-processional, in the sense that horsemen, drummers, banners, lantern-carriers, effigies in carts, etc., mock, in a kind of conscious antiphony, the ceremonial of the processionals’ of state, of law, of civic ceremonial, of the guild and of the church.
But they do not only mock. The relationship between the satirical forms of rough music and the dignified forms of the host society is by no means simple. In one sense the processional may seek to assert the legitimacy of authority. And in certain cases this reminder may be remarkably direct. For the forms of rough music and of charivari are part of the expressive symbolic vocabulary of a certain kind of society — a vocabulary available to all and in which many different sentences may be pronounced. It is a discourse which (while often coincident with literacy) derives its resources from oral transmission, within a society which regulates many of its occasions — of authority and moral conduct — through such theatrical forms as the solemn procession, the pageant, the public exhibition of justice or of charity, public punishment the display of emblems and favours, etc.1
See C. Phythian-Adams, “Ceremony and the Citizen: the Communal Year at Coventry, 1500-1700”, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (1972).
The formal continuities are sometimes startling. The naked parade or “carting” of lewd women or of prostitutes was a punishment which had once been imposed by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Thus, in the Lincoln diocese in 1556 Emma Kerkebie, found guilty of adultery, was sentenced to the public penance: “That the said Emme shal ride through the city and market in a cart, and be ronge out with basons”: i.e. rough musicked.2 A similar punishment was inflicted by officers of the Parliamentary forces in 1642 upon “a whore, which had followed our camp from London”. She was “first led about the city, then set in the pillory, after in the cage, then duckt in a river, and at the last banisht the City”.1 And riding upon a pole or a “wooden horse” was a recognised military punishment, and was inflicted upon soldiers whose behaviour (assaults, petty thefts) endangered relations with the civil populace. Thus in 1686 a court martial sentenced an offending soldier accused of the theft of two silver cups “to ride the wooden horse the next market day in the public market place. . . for the space of two hours with a paper on his breast signifying his offence”.2 The punishment humiliated the offender in front of the populace, and hence it supposedly repaired the damage done to military-civil relations.3
J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials relating chiefly to Religion and the Reformation (1822), iii, p. 409. Riding backwards with the face to the horse’s tail was a punishment inflicted for perjury, corruption, etc. by courts in London and by the Star Chamber in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: see Ingram, “Riding, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes”.
Letters of Nehemiah Wharton, Archaeologia, xxxv (1853), pp. 310-34.
PRO, WO 30/17, pp. 68-9. See also Young, op. cit., p. 190 for the use of this military punishment at Louisbourg (1746) and Boston Common (1764). Black soldiers still received this punishment in the American Civil War: Bell I. Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861-1865 (New Haven, 1965), pp. 317-8.
The wooden horse may have been a permanent civil piece of punitive machinery in some places, along with pillory and stocks. An action in Newcastle-under-Tyne in 1654 turned on a man libelling another as “a base beggarly rascal, and hath cozened the Parliament a hundred times, and deserves to ride the wooden horse, standing on the Sandhill”: Tompkins v Clark (1654), Style 422, ER 82, p. 829.
The punishment could still be inflicted under Army regulations until the early nineteenth century. In 1845, at Yeovil, the same punishment had become an informal institution, it being reported that —
The almost obsolete punishment of “riding the stang”, or wooden horse, was revived in this town last Thursday by a number of builders who, suspecting that one of their number had made free with his comrades’ dinners, pinioned him and paraded him through the streets upon a piece of wood with the words “the thif” chalked on his back. The Lynchers had contrived to refine the cruelty of the punishment by sharpening to a point the rafter on which the unfortunate fellow rode, and by jagging it in several places. He was taken home to Bradford Abbas in a cart on Friday, being so much injured as to be unable to walk.4
Sherborne, Dorchester and Taunton Journal (1845) reported in Somerset County Herald, 23 Aug. 1952.
I do not know whether the formal (legal) and the informal (customary) infliction of such punishments coincided in late medieval and early modern times or whether popular, self-regulating forms (which were often initiated independently of any persons in authority, and which were sometimes conducted in such a way as to ridicule them) took over to new uses forms which the authorities were ceasing to employ. The answer may be “both”. Until the early nineteenth century, publicity was of the essence of punishment. It was intended, for lesser offences, to humiliate the offender before her or his neighbours, and in more serious offences to serve as example. The symbolism of public execution irradiated popular culture in the eighteenth century and contributed much to the vocabulary of rough music.1 The elaborate effigies of the offenders which were carted or ridden through the community always ended up with a hanging or a burning — which recalled the burning of heretics. In extreme cases a mock funeral service was conducted over the effigy before a “burial”. One would be mistaken to see this as only a grotesque jest. To burn, bury or read the funeral service over someone still living was a terrible community judgement, in which the victim was made into an outcast, one considered to be already dead.2 It was the ultimate in excommunication.
See Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E. P. Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975). Compare Natalie Z. Davis, “The Rites of Violence”, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975).
Among examples of burial: Leicester Herald, 17 Apr. 1833 (an unpopular employer is rough musicked by framework knitters, his effigy is carried around on a gallows, executed by gunfire, placed in a grave, and then burned); Hampshire and Berkshire Gazette, 4 Feb. 1882 (a man who has jilted a woman whom he has been courting for several years — his effigy is carried through the village, the funeral knell is tolled, the effigy is hanged, cut down, shot at and burned); Gloucester Standard, 8 Oct. 1892 (the “Dead March” is played during the rough musicking of “scabs” in a boot and shoemakers dispute).
Effigy burning does not belong only with rough music. It can often be found in Britain and in North America detached from other forms of rough music and of course it has been and remains central to Guy Fawkes Day.1 November 5th was a day when effigy burning and rough music ran into each other, and local or public scores were often paid off.2 And effigies were appropriated to every kind of political and religious demonstration. They were simply one (effective and enduring) component of the available symbolic vocabulary, which could be employed in combination with other components (noise, lampoons, obscenities), or could be detached from these altogether. Innumerable examples — political, industrial, private grievances — can be found in any locality.
Alfred Young, “Pope’s Day, Tar and Feathers and Cornet Joyce, Jun”, (forthcoming), discusses both American and English sources; C. S. Burne, “Guy Fawkes Day”, Folk-lore, xxiii, 4 (1912).
Rough music often flourished on November 5th, when it was the custom to make effigies of “any evil doer, bad liver, or unpopular person” in the village and burn these before their homes (example, an unmarried couple): Trans. Devon Assoc., lxvi (1934). See the excellent essay “‘Please to Remember the Fifth of November’: Conflict, Solidarity and Public Order in Southern England, 1815-1900”, in Robert E. Storch, Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (1982), esp. pp. 82-4. John Fletcher, a famous wizard in Pilton, has collected many examples of Guy Fawkes rough musickings in nineteenth-century Somerset, Glastonbury, Wells and Bridgwater being especially ebullient.
With growing literacy, effigies, verse lampoon and anonymous letters or papers posted on the church doors or gates could all be used together. The Reverend Charles Jeffrys Cottrell, JP, the Rector of Hadley in Middlesex, was driven in 1800 to take legal action when he received in the post a portrait of a gibbeted parson with his genitals exposed, inscribed “O what a miserable Shitting Stinking Dogmatick Prig of an April fool I do appear”. (Plate VI.) It seems, from the accompanying depositions, that the prime mover in the campaign against him was Isaac Emmerton, a nurseryman and seedsman, who had also erected on his own land, overlooking the Great North Road, a ten-foot-high gibbet from which was suspended an effigy in a black coat which he had got from a local undertaker. Cottrell was chairman of the local Commissioners of Tax against whom Emmerton had a grievance. But clearly this “Parson and Just Ass” was generally unpopular and people in nearby Barnet were enjoying similar “ludicrous drawings”, which were being passed around. Isaac Emmerton explained, very reasonably, that the effigy was a scarecrow to protect some “curious seeds” and that for this purpose “none but a black coat would answer”.1
Depositions and letter in PRO, King’s Bench Affidavits, KB 1.30 (Easter 40 Geo. III, no. 2). For anonymous threatening letters, see my “The Crime of Anonymity”, in Hay, Linebaugh and Thompson, op. cit.
This has taken us a little out of our way. But the consideration of even such a commonplace part of the symbolic vocabulary as the effigy enforces the point that the symbolism owes much to authority’s pomp of awe and justice, and that rough music may be ambivalent and move between the mockery of authority and its endorsement, the appeal to tradition and the threat of rebellion. By the eighteenth century rough music was normally — but not always — initiated independently of any persons in authority or of gentry status, and was sometimes conducted in opposition to them. Since the church courts in England were in decline from the late seventeenth century, and were exercising less effectively their powers to inflict penalties for domestic and sexual offences, it is tempting to suggest that the vigour of eighteenth-century rough music indicated a shift from ecclesiastical regulation to community self-regulation in such cases. But this hypothesis has not been seriously tested. Or, if one sees an antiphony between the forms of authority and of the populace, one might ask whether, as ritual and processional declined in Protestant England, so the satiric anti-processional element in popular forms declined in ratio? In Catholic societies which maintained the processions and festivals of church and state with more vigour, did the mock processionals of charivari maintain for longer their elaboration?
2) The forms are pliant. Indeed, they have great flexibility. Even in the same region similar forms can be used to express a good-humoured jest or to invoke inexorable community antagonism. “Skimmingtons” of great elaboration were sometimes mounted as community jokes — for example, in Exeter in 1817 a riding with horsemen, a band, twenty-four donkeys, and much paraphernalia was laid on to ridicule the second marriage of a local saddler who had made himself obnoxious as a braggart and ostentatious patriot during the French Wars.1 In Barnsley in 1844 the marriage of two local characters thought for some reason to be comic was “published” by an elaborate procession of power-loom weavers. Two led, one dressed in a skin, the other with a flag “Haste to the Wedding”; next a cart drawn by a mule with a fiddler astride it, and with whistles and tin cans played by the cart’s occupants.2 Jests of this kind might easily turn sour. When a butcher on the Isle of Wight, at Newport, married “an elderly maiden lady of good fortune” (1782) his fellow butchers attended to celebrate the event with marrowbones and cleavers. The bridegroom lost his temper and ordered them to go away:
Exeter Flying Post, 2 Oct. 1817; U. Radford, “The Loyal Saddler of Exeter”, Trans. Devon Assoc., lxv (1933), pp. 227-35.
Halifax Guardian, 20 Jan. 1844. Thanks to Dorothy Thompson.
They had been expecting to be treated instead of being threatened with prison as a riotous mob. They returned, each with a pair of rams’ horns fixed on their heads, and a drummer which they had hired. . . beating the cuckolds march. Outraged, the bridegroom fired at them, killing one and wounding two.3
Hampshire Chronicle, 11 Feb. 1782. Thanks to John Rule.
The “skimmington” could also, in one variant, be used to establish what was known as a “horn fair” — in Devon if a “skimmington” or “skivetton” rode uncontested through a town, and nailed a pair of horns to the church door, then the claim to establish a cattle fair was made (and upheld).4 “In consequence of some Woman in Calstock having beat her Husband”, a correspondent wrote to the duke of Portland in 1800, “the Miners have made a Procession thro’ the Neighbourhood & several Market Towns, in order, as they say, to establish an Horn or Cuckold’s Fair at Calstock Town; the first of which Fairs is to be held there on Tuesday next”. “Riotous Consequences” were apprehended, as “several very notorious bad Fellows” were among them.5 The most famous Horn Fair might have had some such origin, and was held at Charlton on the Kentish edge of London. By the seventeenth century it had become an annual carnival, held on St. Luke’s day. In the eighteenth century it was proclaimed by printed summonses (Plate XXIV), and consisted of “a riotous mob, who. . . meet at Cuckold’s Point, near Deptford, and march from thence in procession, through the town and Greenwich, to Charlton, with horns of different kinds upon their heads; and at the fair. . . even the gingerbread figures have horns”.1 Attendance at this supposedly licentious and bacchanalian event was not confined to the plebs — young patricians also might come, masked and in transvestite disguise — and all the symbolic vocabulary of “skimmingtons” and cuckoldry was kept vigorously alive (Plate XV).2
J. R. Chanter, “North Devon Customs”, Trans. Devon Assoc., ii (1867-8), pp. 38-42.
J. P. Carpenter to Portland, 22 June 1800, PRO, HO 42.50.
Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 2nd edn. (1788).
John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (1813), ii, p. 112; William Hone, The Every-Day Book (1826), i, cols. 1386-8; Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 77-8.
The more one examines the diversity of the evidence, the more difficult it is to define exactly what a rough music was. Sometimes we have nothing more than a boozy, jocular row outside the cottage on a couple’s first wedding-night — although rarely without a satirical accent — by the unmarried young men of the community.3 Some forms were also employed as games on festivals or as initiations into trades.4 In the North-East in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when a pitman married he was made to “ride the stang”, and was carried on a pole by his fellow pitmen to a pub where he was expected to treat his mates to drinks:
The late Mr G Ewart Evans kindly loaned to me a tape of an account given to him by Mrs Flack of Depden Green, near Bury St Edmunds in 1964, who described such “music” as very common until 1920 at weddings. People of “all sorts” gathered, and were asked in for drinks. She recalled only one occasion where it was used against supposed offenders. In London and elsewhere butchers’ men made up bands, with marrowbones beating on cleavers (ground to the production of notes like a peal of bells), and attended wedding parties until paid off with money or beer: R. Chambers, The Book of Days (1878), i, p. 360.
See Ingram, “Riding, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes”, pp. 94-6. “Wooset” or “hooset” hunting seems to be a cousin to Christmas and animal-guising customs, such as the hooden horse in East Kent and souling in Cheshire: see P. Maylam, The Hooden Horse, an East Kent Christmas Custom (Canterbury, 1909), ch. 4; Violet Alford, The Hobby Horse and other Animal Masks (1978).
They myed me ride the stang, as suin
As aw show’d fyece at wark agyen.1
Thomas Wilson, The Pitman’s Pay, and other poems (Gateshead, 1843), pp. 56-63.
This was a good-humoured custom whose only function was as a ransom for drink. But in the same region in the same period “riding the stang” was a severe, and on occasion mutilating, punishment inflicted by pitmen and seamen upon blacklegs during a strike or upon informers or crimps.2
Newcastle Chronicle, 7 and 21 May 1785, 4 Nov. 1792; Sunderland Herald, 12 Feb. 1851; W. Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), p. 30. In February 1783 at the close of the first American war sailors got shore leave and revenged themselves upon informers who had betrayed them to the pressgang by “stanging” them through the streets: the women “bedaubed them plentifully with rotten eggs, soap suds, mud, &c.”. One was treated so severely on the “stang” that he subsequently died: “The Press Gang in the Northern Counties”, Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend, v, 47 (1891).
3) Even when rough music was expressive of the most absolute community hostility, and its intention was to ostracise or drive out an offender, the ritual element may be seen as channelling and controlling this hostility. There seems to have been a progressive distancing from direct physical violence, although the evidence is inconclusive. Dr Martin Ingram shows us seventeenth-century next-door-neighbours serving as proxies for the ridings, just as proxies are frequently found in the nineteenth century. But just as Agnes Mills of Quemerford was physically assaulted and thrown in the mud in 1618, so examples of such assaults — or of “stang ridings” ending in the midden or the duck-pond — can be found two hundred years later.3 And the “stang”, as we have seen, could be employed as a mutilating instrument. In Galloway wife-beaters were ridden to a “nominy”,
