Customs in Common, page 62
3) A number of sexual offences could occasion rough music. Unfortunately contemporary definition of the offence is usually evasive and lacking in specificity. Most often, the occasion appears to have been adultery between two married persons. A noted seducer of young women (especially if himself married) could be victimised. On occasion homosexuality or other “nameless” behaviour, regarded as perversion, was the object. A broken marriage or the sale of a wife could (but usually did not) bring rough music as a sequel.
4) Wife-beating or other ill-treatment of the wife by the husband; and cruelty to children.
Before examining these occasions further, it will be of interest to note the findings of other studies, based not upon British but upon French and European materials. Violet Alford, who claimed to have more than 250 examples of charivari “under her hand” offered this break-down:
77The re-marriage of widows or widowers.
49Wives beating husbands.
35Adultery.
24For newly-married couples.
89“Other causes” (some of which might be in my category of “public”).
Her examples are of interest, but since they are derived from South, Central, and Western Europe, and are culled from perhaps eight centuries, they necessarily lack specificity of context.1
Alford, “Rough Music or Charivari”, op. cit.
The learned French folklorist, Arnold Van Gennep, attempted no tabulation of his findings, but suggested that the main occasion for charivari in France over several centuries was for the marriage of widow or widower. Charivari has been directed also —
aux maris battus par leur femme; aux avares, notamment dès la période enfantine, aux parrains et marraines chiches de dregées et de sous; aux étrangers qui, venus s’installer aux même de passage, ne paient pas le bienvenue; aux filles folles de leur corps; aux femmes adultères; aux ivrognes invétérés, brutaux et tapageurs; aux dénonciateurs et calomnieteurs; aux maris qui courent trop le guilledon; bref, à tous ceux qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, excitent contre eux l’opinion publique de la communiaute locale.2
Van Gennep, op. cit., i, p. 202.
To the sexual occasions may be added girls who turn down a suitor of repute in the community for another who is richer, too old, or foreign; pregnant brides who marry in white; a youth who “sells” himself to a woman for her money; marriages which do not respect the prohibited degrees of kinship; girls who take a married man as their lover; maris complaisants, or husbands who “se conduisant dans leur ménage d’une manière plutôt féminine que masculine”.3 All these offenders (if we except certain cases which might fall into the “public” category) appear to fall within my divisions 1), 2) and 3). Van Gennep appears to cite only one case of wife-beating.1
Ibid., i, pt. 2, pp. 614-28.
A case is cited in Franche-Comté, ibid., p. 619, note 2. In Diderot et d’Alambert, Encyclopédie (Paris, 1753, edn.), p. 208, it is assumed that charivari is occasioned by “personnes qui convolent en secondes, en troisièmes noces; & meme de celles qui épousent des personnes d’un âge fort inégal au leur”.
Lévi-Strauss, on the basis of unpublished findings by P. Fortier-Beaulieu, affirmed that 92.5 per cent of the cases under examination are occasioned by re-marriage, accompanied by disparity in age or wealth; or between individuals who are old; or after improper conduct during widowhood.2 Unfortunately, these findings were based on a survey conducted in 1937, into (precisely) manifestations on the occasion of the re-marriage of a widow or widower, and hence had an inbuilt tendency to endorse Lévi-Strauss’s theorisation of charivari as signalling a fracture in “la continuité idéale de la chaîne des alliances matrimoniales”.3
Lévi-Strauss, op. cit., pp. 293-5. See also P. Fortier-Beaulieu, Mariages et Noces Campagnardes dans. . . le Department de la Loire (Paris, 1937).
See Appendix II.
In her important study Natalie Davis examined some aspects of charivari in sixteenth-century France. Her findings suggest that the overwhelming majority of cases fell within categories 1) and 2), and that re-marriage was a primary target for the rituals. The most frequent occasion for charivari in villages (she writes):
was in connection with second marriages, especially when there was a gross disparity in age between the bride and groom. Then the masked youth with their pots, tambourines, bells, rattles and horns might make their clamor for a week outside the house of their victims, until they settled and paid a fine.
In an urban context she detects a shift; second marriages receive less attention, while the husband-beating wife and the beaten husband receive more, “for according to the provision of divine and civil law, the wife is subject to the husband; and if husbands suffer themselves to be governed by their wives, they might as well be led out to pasture”. Adulteries, it would seem, received attention, and miscellaneous “faits vicieux” — thefts, murders, bizarre marriages, seductions; but wife-beating scarcely at all.1
N. Z. Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France”, Past and Present, 50 (1971). The author cites one case only occasioned by wife-beating, at Dijon in the month of May, 1583: see p. 45, note 13.
Subsequent research, by Davis and others, has refined these views and has added new occasions, but has not seriously revised them.2 Martin Ingram’s work on rough music in early modern England suggests both parallels and divergences. The institutional or quasi-institutional role of young unmarried men, or of the French youth “abbeys”, has not yet been proved to have been found in England.3 Ingram finds that “domestic situations, especially female domination, were the most usual occasions for charivaris in early modern England”, just as they could occasion charivaris in seventeenth-century Lyons or Geneva.4 An impression is formed that British rough music, over several centuries, may have been more abrasive and retributive than French charivari; although it is not impossible that, until recently, charivari has been a little softened and made picturesque in the French folklorique tradition.5 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors had been familiar with colourful parties investing a wedding and serenading the couple until paid off with money or drinks:
See especially the contributions of André Burguière and Nicole Castan in Le Charivari.
However Bernard Capp, “English Youth Groups and The Pinder of Wakefield”, in Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1984) offers some suggestive evidence.
Ingram, “Riding, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes”, p. 169 and “Ridings”, pp. 90-91; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Charivari, honneur et communauté à Lyon et á Genève au XVIIe siecle”, Le Charivari, pp. 221-8.
The account of suicides and vendettas associated with charivari which is hinted at by Alford, “Rough Music or Charivari”, pp. 510 and 513-4 contrasts with more romantic accounts by some popular authors. Compare the psychic violence of the “el vito” as described by J. A. Pitt Rivers, The People of the Sierra (1954), pp. 169 ff.
Dis donc vielle carcasse
Veux-tu pas nous payer
La dime de tes noces
Aux enfants du quartier.
Si tu fais la rebelle
On vient t’avertir,
Que pendant la semaine
On battre Charivari!1
Musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires, Paris, MS B 19, song from Thônes (Haute Savoie). See Shorter, op. cit., p. 221 for a variant.
This had become, in expectation, what a charivari was and the ritual was theorised accordingly. And the paradigm of charivari was seen to be in the serenading of the re-marriage of the widow or the widower.
But the evidence available from Germany, some parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and North America does not give the same priority to second marriages. In Bavaria the punitive haberfeldtreiben passed through phases, but was primarily directed at offenders against sexual norms,2 while the occasions for katzenmusik in Western Germany seem to have been as various as occasions for “skimmingtons” and “stangs”.3 Re-marriage rarely is mentioned among these, nor does it feature in Roumania, where other attributes of rough music — noisy, masked demonstrations with effigies and obscene verses — are found.4 Nor, indeed, in Hungary, which had, until recently, a group of colourful, and sometimes vindictive, practices involving rough music (with ploughshares tied together and caterwauling), animal guising, mock marriage ceremonies, shadowy courts of popular law (as in Bavaria) and lampoons.5 Re-marriage does turn up as an occasion for charivaris in North America, especially in regions of strong French influence, but the evidence is as various as the British.6
See Ian Farr and Ernst Hinrichs in Le Charivari.
Hoffman-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli, op. cit., entry under “Katzenmusik”.
See Dominique Lesourd in Le Charivari.
Tekle Dömötör, op. cit.
See especially Bryan Palmer, “Discordant Music”.
Let us content ourselves, for the moment, with saying that the evidence is untidy, and does not even show us whether French charivari or English rough music is the mutant from some common European stock; or, indeed, whether in their simplest components of noise and ridicule, both may not be universal.
Re-marriage of a widow or widower may have occasioned rough music in England, if accompanied by other circumstances, such as a disparity of ages or the imputed avarice of a young bride for a wealthy old widower. But examples are few. Rough music — and especially the “skimmington” — was directed until the nineteenth century against those who had offended against male-dominative norms and imperatives (group 1). A “skimmington” —
Is but a riding, used of course
When the grey mare’s the better horse;
When o’er the breeches greedy women
Fight, to extend their vast dominion.1
From the fullest literary account of a “skimmington riding”, in Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Second Part, Canto II, ed. J. Wilders (Oxford, 1967), pp. 142-9. The Second Part of this poem was first published in 1663. This section continues:
When Wives their Sexes shift, like Hares,
And ride their Husbands, like Night-mares,
And they in mortal Battle vanquish’d,
Are of their Charter dis-enfranchizd,
And by the Right of War like Gills (a)
Condemn’d to Distaff, Horns (b), and Wheels (c);
For when Men by their Wives are Cow’d,
Their Horns of course are understood.
(a) Gills — wenches, girls; (b) Horns — the symbol of the cuckold;
(c) Wheels — spinning-wheels (like distaffs) are symbols of women’s work and feminine roles.
Or in Andrew Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter:
A Punishment invented first to awe
Masculine Wives, transgressing Natures Law.
Where when the brawny Female disobeys,
And beats the Husband till for peace he prays;
No concern’d Jury for him Damage finds,
No partial Justice her Behaviour binds;
But the just Street does the next House invade,
Mounting the neighbour Couple on lean Jade.
The Distaff knocks, the Grains from Kettle fly,
And Boys and Girls in Troops run houting by. . .
Still, in the eighteenth century and, in some regions, in the nineteenth, the “patriarchal” humiliation of unruly women remains a predominant theme; or of those families in which (as the phrase is) “the grey mare is the better horse”.1 When Henri Misson met in the London streets a woman carrying a straw effigy crowned with a fine pair of horns, “preceded by a Drum, and follow’d by a Mob, making a most grating Noise with Tongs, Grid-irons, Frying-pans, &c.”, he was told that “a Woman had given her Husband a sound beating for accusing her of making him a Cuckold, and that upon such Occasions some kind Neighbour of the poor innocent injur’d Creature [la pauvre Calomniéel] generally perform’d this Ceremony”.2 This was, presumably, London’s attenuated “skimmington”, and the mockery was being directed quite as much against the husband as the wife. But as late as 1838 Mrs Gaskell (a reliable observer) was writing to Mary Howitt of “Riding Stang” as “a custom all over Cheshire”, and in its older male-dominative form:
Robert W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), p. 105.
Henri Misson de Valbourg, Memoirs et Observations Faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre (Paris, 1698), p. 70, and H. Misson, Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England (1719), p. 129.
When any woman, a wife more particularly, has been scolding, beating or otherwise abusing the other sex, and is publicly known, she is made to ride stang. A crowd of people assemble towards evening after work hours, with an old, shabby, broken down horse. They hunt out the delinquent. . . and mount her on their Rozinante. . . astride with her face to the tail. So they parade her through the nearest village or town; drowning her scolding and clamour with the noise of frying pans &c, just as you would scare a swarm of bees. And though I have known this done in many instances, I never knew the woman seek any redress, or the avengers proceed to any more disorderly conduct after they had once made the guilty one “ride stang”.3
J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds.), The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester, 1966), pp. 29-31. My thanks to David Englander.
I have placed “patriarchal” in inverted commas, because the term can involve us in difficulties. Feminist theorists, who allocate a central place to patriarchy, are rarely historians and they are sometimes impatient with historians’ objections. As a result “patriarchy” is invoked indiscriminately, to cover every situation and institution of male-domination. The “trouble with patriarchy” (as Sheila Rowbotham warned long ago) is not only that it generalises a very specific set of theories and institutions where the monarch or the head of the household commanded authority over subjects, wife, children, apprentices, servants, etc. — theories and institutions under challenge in the seventeenth century and beginning to decompose — but also that the term is so undiscriminating that it offers no vocabulary to express differences in degree and even in quality of male-domination. As Rowbotham warned:
“Patriarchy” implies a structure which is fixed, rather than the kaleidoscope of forms within which women and men have encountered one another. It does not carry any notion of how women might act to transform their situation as a sex. Nor does it even convey a sense of how women have resolutely manoeuvred for a better position within the general context of subordination. . .
Moreover, “some aspects of male-female relationships are evidently not simply oppressive, but include varying degrees of mutual aid. The concept of ‘patriarchy’ has no room for such subtleties.” “‘Patriarchy’ suggests a fatalistic submission which allows no space for the complexities of women’s defiance”,1 and if this is so — and in widespread ideological usage it is so — it does not illuminate women’s history but obscures and even confiscates some part of it.
Sheila Rowbotham, “The Trouble with ‘Patriarchy’”, New Statesman, 21-28 Dec. 1979, reprinted in Rowbotham. Dreams and Dilemmas (1983), pp. 207-14.
Male-domination is not at issue, but this may take place through brothers, neighbours, employers, the structures of law or of religion, as much as through the household-head implicit in Filmer’s patriarchal theory.2 Moreover, “patriarchy” gives us a poor vocabulary to express large modifications in the forms of male-domination and control, gender alienation or (on occasion) gender partnership. Both sexes might find themselves committed to the house of correction for no more explicit an offence than being “loose and disorderly persons”.1 But in backward or “traditional” areas, women might be presumed to be “loose and disorderly” if they were working people and if they had no male structure of control and protection. These assumptions find clear expression in an affidavit (1704) by Thomas Sexton, a Suffolk husbandman, who was defending himself against a charge of assault brought by Joanna Box, spinster:
See G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York, 1975).
Examples can be found in most CROs, especially in the committals to bridewells or houses of correction. For plentiful “loose and disorderly” committals (both sexes) see e.g. Hants. CRO, QS B/xvib/2/5, Calendars of prisoners in House of Correction, April, July and October 1723. Or in the 1760s an unusually zealous magistrate in Cirencester (Thomas Bush) was frequently committing persons for swearing (usually men), for disobedience to their masters (apprentices), for being “rogues and vagabonds” and (Ann Rundle, committed 28 July 1766) for “Being a Very Lewd Idle and Disorderly Person and Refusing to Give Security for her Good Behaviour”. Gloucester CRO, Q/SG 1763-6. All this was normal; see Joanna Innes, “Prisons for the poor: English bridewells, 1555-1800”, in Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay, Labour and Crime (1987), esp. pp. 84-5, 99, 114 n 21.
The said Joanna & Mary Box are two lusty young wenches & fare well & plentifully, & will not go to service, but live with their said mother, in a little house & occupy no land, nor having any visible estate or stock to live upon in an honest way, except Spining wch is a miserable trade now since the wars; no man nor woman living with them, except when some men of no very good fame haunt & frequent their company.2
PRO, KB 2.1 (Part One), Affidavits, Anne (Misc.): Regina v William Copsey.
Joanna and Mary’s mother was married to a chimney sweep but they had split up. This Suffolk husbandman presumed that he could insinuate that any such masterless women were whores.
Such truly “patriarchal” attitudes persist into the nineteenth (and indeed twentieth) centuries. The ducking-stool is still employed against scolds (almost always against the feminine tongue) in the eighteenth century,3 and there are even instances of the use of the vicious scold’s bridle in the early nineteenth century. There is a remarkable reminiscence of this from the deeply-traditional little town of Wenlock in Shropshire. Public punishments — whippings, the stocks, the shrew’s bridle — were inflicted on Mondays, which were market days:
