Customs in Common, page 66
Frank Peel, Spen Valley: Past and Present (Heckmondwike, 1893), pp. 307-8.
There were a few cities where the reformers were strong enough to respond in kind. Bishop Horsley received a well-merited burning-in-effigy in his own cathedral city of Rochester after he had said, in the House of Lords, that “the mass of the people have nothing to do with the laws, but to obey them”.2 But reformers were more often the targets of such affairs, and they formed a dislike for their “mob” characteristics. Where the rites of rough music survive after 1815 they appear to have an increasingly socially-conservative character.
Parliamentary Register, xliii, pp. 351-4. The duke of Brunswick (in effigy) was given a ceremonial hanging and burning on Kensington Common on November 5th, 1792: letter from London in Pittsburgh Gazette, 2 Feb. 1793. In Norwich in 1796 bonfires were preceded by a mock procession in which effigies of Pitt, Windham and the bishop of Rochester were carted with ropes around their necks.
So much is easy to set down: and it may mean less than it seems to mean. For it is by no means easy to identify the kind of nineteenth-century community in which rough music survived longest. While the elaborated forms of the ritual were clearly a folklorist’s delight, while such forms as “wooset-hunting” and the stag-hunt were recorded in isolated West Country villages with names like Ogburne St. George, Whitechurch Canonicorum and Okeford Fitzpaine, and can be seen as animated ethnological vestiges, exotic blow-flies in rural amber, at the same time good old-fashioned rough music continued vigorously in an urban and industrial context. We have noted it in Kentish London; it was vigorous in mid nineteenth-century Huddersfield or Pudsey in the West Yorkshire industrial belt;1 and in Gorton, near Manchester, when a married surgeon who had eloped with a patient’s wife was the object, Gorton cotton mills were closed for half a day in order that eight hundred factory hands could take part.2
See e.g. Easther and Lees, op. cit., pp. 128-9; J. Lawson, Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey (Stanningley, 1887), p. 66.
N & Q, 5th series, v (1876), p. 253.
There is, even in such cases, a sense that rough music belonged in some way to the “older”, “rougher” parts of the town; but it is difficult to detect exactly what such descriptions imply, unless the tautology that where rough music persisted must be rough. Thomas Hardy suggests that his “skimmington” emerged from the district of Mixen Lane —
the Adullam of all the surrounding villages. It was the hiding-place of those who were in distress, and in debt, and trouble of every kind. Farm-labourers and other peasants, who combined a little poaching with farming, and a little brawling and bibbing with their poaching, found themselves sooner or later in Mixen Lane. Rural mechanics too idle to mechanize, rural servants too rebellious to serve, drifted or were forced into Mixen Lane.
But the evidence does not altogether confirm Hardy’s characterisation. The vigorous rough music described in Appendix 1 took place early in this century in Siddal, a district of Halifax dominated by one large woollen mill, and with some mining, quarrying and brick-making. Decidedly working-class and traditional, yet Siddal was also one of the first places where (in 1892) I.L.P. councillors were elected. It is clear that the “old culture” of rough music could survive with great tenacity alongside more “modern” forms, and could co-exist with these. Yet this does not happen everywhere, and one must look for additional explanations for this co-existence. Munby found, in the 1860s, old forms surviving as a set in the Surrey of Ripley:
They still play football in the street on Shrove Tuesday, and turn out on Guy Faux Day in a long procession of masks and mummers: they still pursue every cruel husband with the Nemesis of marrowbones and cleavers.
On May Day young girls in muslin still carried little Maypoles wreathed with flowers from house to house. But Munby could suggest no reason for these survivals other than the village’s isolation — six miles from a railway and no intercourse with London other than a weekly carrier’s cart.1
Munby diaries in Trinity College, Cambridge, vols. xvii, p. 241, 4 March 1863; xix, pp. 4-5, 7, 13, 2 May 1863. My thanks to Anna Davin.
In the same year that Munby visited Ripley, rough music was a little discouraged by a legal decision that a stag-hunt was “a game” within the meaning of 5 & 6 Will. IV, c. 50, and hence prohibited in the streets.2 It was widely argued thereafter that all rough music in the streets were prohibited “games”. It is doubtful whether this had much influence on rough music’s decline, which was inexorable but very slow. In 1930 it was reported in the Evening Standard that —
See Pappin v Maynard, in Law Times, 21 Nov. 1863. Decisions in King’s Bench in the late seventeenth century had defined “riding skimmington” as riot, see Ingram, op. cit., p. 101.
Grey-haired women, their hair streaming in the breeze, clasped hands and danced solemnly round a bonfire where the effigies of three people were in flames. No smile was on their faces, and from their lips fell curses on a young husband. All around them were a host of men, women and children, chanting monotonously and beating tin cans, old kettles and cracked bells.
This “hussitting” in the Berkshire village of Woodley was directed at a man who had been summoned by his wife for cruelty, and against his mother and sister who had sided against the wife: “It is 30 years since we gave anyone ‘rough music’”, one of the oldest villagers said. “Then it was a married man who had been annoying girls.”3
Evening Standard, 3 Oct. 1930.
I would hazard that there may be a relation between the continuity of rough music and the continuity of local dialect. (The ceffyl pren persisted most vigorously in Welsh-speaking regions, such as Carmarthen.) The rites belong in an orally-transmitted culture, and the strength of dialect signals also the tenacity of a traditional consciousness, upheld (perhaps) in such villages as Ripley and Woodley by closely-knitted kinship. Both dialect and customs can reproduce themselves together, and can long persist into mature industrial society. But at a certain point those engines of cultural acceleration, literacy and schooling, combine with increasing in-migration and general mobility, to “saturate” the old culture, to disperse it as a living practice, to break down the old sensibility, leaving nothing but antiquarian survivals.
What then may survive, in pockets in urban districts and, more often, in the remote countryside, are certain old traditions maintained sometimes by particular occupational groups who are at odds with the politer modern norms and who are seen by their neighbours as “rough” or “ruffians” (i.e. “rough ’uns”). In the North Yorkshire village of Kirkby Malzeard “stang riding” still was being practised at the end of the last century, with a variant of the old “nominy”. It always originated in the pub. “Everything originated in the pub in them days. They’d all be ‘leaders’”, recalled an informant in 1971. The initiators were a small group of men: building workers, a blacksmith, itinerant labourers who worked at various jobs, working on estates, at fair grounds, hedging and dyking in the winter; “they were rough types”, poachers, heavy drinkers — “if they thought they could get a glass of beer they’d bray owt”. But they were also the people who kept alive the “Plough Stots” and the complex Sword Dance of Kirkby Malzeard, and who performed it for money or drink at fairs and at flower shows:
These sort used to go sword dancing — but they always used to spend the money on beer, and sleep out in the woods. . . But the Stang was different. They did that because working class people are more faithful to their wives than are t’nobs. And anyone as beats ’is wife up or a child is a bad ’un. They really had to feel very, very strongly about this carryon. Then it was a big disgrace, it brought it out in the open. They didn’t do it just for a lark.
The last time the “stang” was ridden in Kirkby Malzeard was because a labourer had been beating his wife:
He’d a houseful of kids — ten or a dozen children. It had got out that he’d been braying his wife — coming home from the pub, she’d be there with a houseful of kids, and then he’d start in and bashed her about.
They got a big effigy which they fastened on a hand-cart, “and these big brawling chaps they went to the house and bumped on the door”. As they went down the village street they rang a big bell and reeled off “the ditty”. “They used to make such a din and commotion people would pay anything to get them away.”1
Accounts collected by the late Kathleen Bumstead in 1971.
This sounds folksy and even reassuring. But rough music could also be an excuse for a drunken orgy or for blackmail. It could legitimise the aggression of youths, and (if one may whisper it) youths are not always, in every historical context, protagonists of rationality or of change. I make the point strongly, arguing in a sense with part of myself, for I find much that attracts me in rough music. It is a property of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureau-criticised, but is enacted by and within the community. Where it is enacted upon an evident malefactor — some officious public figure or a brutal wife-beater — one is tempted to lament the passing of the rites. But the victims were not all of this order. They might equally be some lonely sexual non-conformist, some Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley living together out of holy wedlock. And the psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear upon them was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their ancient associations with heretic-burning and the maiming of images — the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of masking and of animal-guising — the flaunting of obscenities — the driving out of evil spirits with noise.
Rough music belongs to a mode of life in which some part of the law belongs still to the community and is theirs to enforce. To this one may assent. It indicates modes of social self-control and the disciplining of certain kinds of violence and anti-social offence (insults to women, child abuse, wife-beating) which in today’s cities may be breaking down. But, when we consider the societies which have been under our examination, one must add a rider. Because law belongs to people, and is not alienated, or delegated, it is not thereby made necessarily more “nice” and tolerant, more cosy and folksy. It is only as nice and as tolerant as the prejudices and norms of the folk allow. Some forms of rough music disappeared from history in shadowy complicity with bigotry, jingoism and worse. In Sussex rough music was visited upon “pro-Boers”, including William Morris’s close friend, Georgie Burne-Jones. In Bavaria the last manifestations of haberfeldtreiben were linked to mafia-like blackmail, anti-semitism and, in the final stage, to ascendant Nazism.1 For some of its victims, the coming of a distanced (if alienated) Law and a bureaucratised police must have been felt as a liberation from the tyranny of one’s “own”.
See Le Charivari, pp. 294, 306.
APPENDIX I
The late Mr Hanson Halstead was born in Siddal, Halifax at the end of the last century. He was for some years an engineer, active trade unionist and socialist, and member of the NCLC; but he seemed more like a countryman, was a strong dialect speaker, and in his later years took on a smallholding with pig-keeping. At the end of his life, in the early 1960s, he started jotting down reminiscences in a Boots diary (which he gave to me). The episode below is undated, but probably dates from the earliest years of the present century.
The Burning of the Shrew
When Mary came hoam from her wark she war full o news. She said, ‘Has ta heard, Bill, ’at Jack so and so has gorn a living wi Misis so and so in Jubilee Road?’ ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Them ’at haven’t trouble seem to make some for the’sens.’ ‘Aye, but I haven’t told thee all yet.’ ‘Well, what else is ther to tell?’ ‘Well, to-morn neet they are goin to burn them up.’ ‘So there is goin to be some fun, eh?’ ‘Aye, sum on ’em is making two big dummies, stuffed wi’ sawdust, and pariffin oil, and they are going to be facing one another on a long pole, and there is going to be a procession around the village and to end in Jubilee Road.’
A lott were all looking for’ard to it, a lott ’at wor no better theirselves. On the night, as it became dusk they went and fetched out the dummies, and it was like some devil’s madjic. They sett off around the village, and the procession grew and grew — folk wi’ bells and draw tins, cake tins, owt ’at would make a noise; and it was nearly as good a noise as a jazz band ont wireless reckons to make with £2,000 worth of instruments. It went around the village, and landed in Jubilee Road. Talk about advertising! The police was there, and, Hell, they had to get a lott to break a way through, for the dummeys. There were a lott more people packed in Jubilee Road than lived in Siddal and no advertising. Well, the dummeys went through. The police tried to get it, but women danced in front of them and sat down in the street in front of them to stop them. But it went on, and up Scarhall stepps and back darn Backhold Lane around to Jubilee Road. Then they sett them on fire, and when they got in front of the house, and it was blazing like hell, the police was protecting the door. Then it was thrown on top of them. Two days later they removed, and they drummed them out unceremoniously with cake-tins and draw-tins. But that crowd! you could have walked on their heads. There will never be a crowd like that in Jubilee Road again, and no advertising. (A little bit of savagery.) Don’t think I am making out Siddal to be a reight good moral place: I am not. It was like any other place, as the Parson’s egg.
(One or two modifications to spelling and also to punctuation.)
APPENDIX II
It has been noted (see p. 495 above) that Lévi-Strauss cited in Mythologiques I. Le Cru et le Cuit an unpublished survey of the practice of charivari carried out by P. Fortier-Beaulieu, from which he derived the conclusion that in 92.5 per cent of the examined cases, the occasion for charivari was remarriage.
Some extracts from Fortier-Beaulieu’s survey were published in Revue de folklore francaise et de folklore colonial, xi (1940). The original replies to his questionnaire remain in the archives of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (see MS B 19, 1 a 620, et MS 44,390) and I am greatly indebted to M. le Conservateur, and to the staff of the Musée for their courtesy and assistance in permitting me to consult these archives.
The survey took place between June and August 1937, and took the form of a questionnaire submitted to Mairies by P. Fortier-Beaulieu, at that time Secrétaire à la Propaganda of the Folklore Society. The questionnaire, in fact, makes no reference to charivari, but is headed simply “Manifestation à l’occasion du remariage d’un veuf ou d’une veuve”; a reply was called for urgently, to enable Fortier-Beaulieu to prepare a report on “Veuvage et le Remariage” at the forthcoming International Congress of Folklore.
Thus the enquiry was not conducted into the practice of charivari as such, but into any type of manifestation at remarriage. It is therefore surprising, not that 92.5 per cent of the responses cite re-marriage as the occasion for charivari, but that the number falls short of 100 per cent. But the responses are not, in any case, of a kind which may be submitted to a serious exercise in quantification. Of 307 responses, 123 signalled manifestations of some kind upon re-marriage (usually charivari), 113 signalled no manifestations, 42 signalled that such manifestations no longer occurred, and 29 signalled “néant”. Of the 123 affirmative replies, perhaps one half were perfunctory and completed in haste (“oui”, “non”), while some thirty or forty were answered scrupulously and in detail. Except in a few cases, where the mayor passed the questionnaire over to a local folklorist or historian, the respondents had no special qualifications to answer the questions. One deduces that often the form was passed over to a secretary in the Mairie, while on a few fortunate occasions the mayor was a man of wide local knowledge and observation, and took pleasure in a task unfamiliar among routine business.
Thus the value of the survey lies not in any quantitative deductions, of even the most elementary kind, but in the materials presented in some thirty of the more conscientious replies. Before attending to these, we must offer a caution. The survey, in 1937, is dealing not with a custom in its vigour, but with vestiges and survivals. Hence we may not properly deduce from it functions which belong to the custom in its maturity. “A l’heure actuelle cette coutume qui n’existe que dans les campagnes est une plaisantrie et un divertissement pour la jeunese” (Rodez, Aveyron); it survived, if at all, as a good-humoured form of blackmail, to raise a few sous pour boire.
Insofar as such vestiges can offer evidence, there are replies which give support to most of the hypotheses debated by students of charivari. From Brive (Corrèze): “La veuve qui se remarie n’est guère bien considérée comme devenant infidèle à la mémoire du mari défunt”; or, again, “parce que le mariage est considéré comme un sacrement et que les conjoints n’ont pas moralement le droit de le rompre même après la mort” (Castillon, Ariège). A few replies indicate in some manner the representation of the spirit of the dead spouse at the charivari: “on évoque la vie passée des époux, leurs moeurs, leur vie galante, quelquefois c’est bien corsé” (Donzers, Drôme). Sexual ridicule of the aged, and in particular of disparity of ages, is frequently mentioned. An explanation which is offered only once is “pour chasser les mauvais esprits” (Aups, Var). The theory of a limited “pool of eligibles” also appears — if the second marriage should “enlève une possibilité du moins du choix pour les autres” (Séez, Savoie). The jealousy of friends, neighbours, parents (or of the parents of the dead spouse), and of children is more often mentioned. A charivari at Hyères (Var) had been organised by the grown-up son of the widower. The function was to protect “les intérêts des enfants du premier lit” (Remiremont, Vosges); “les enfants d’un premier lit ayant souvent à pâtir du second mariage — d’où le péjoratif: marâtre” (Cahors, Lot). The relationship of charivari to differing inheritance customs is not a question which, to my knowledge, has yet been adequately pursued.
