Bob Bushaway – By Rite, Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880
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Bob Bushaway – By Rite, Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880
[Junction Books 1982] This book is now republished by Breviary Stuff Publications. more info…
Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E.P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives.
Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively.
This book opens with an introductory chapter which attempts to explain the context of custom by illustrating that historical continuity was seen as the prinicipal requirement for any kind of collective action to be characterised as 'customary'. Some legal opinion in the eighteenth century strove to undermine the notion of custom and replace it with the certainties of statute law. From this it can be seen that an official culture was often in conflict with unofficial popular morality. Chapter 2 represents an endeavour to reconstruct several local customary calendars for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show that the efforts of folklorists and others have resulted in the constructon of artificial regional or even national calendars of custom and usage which destroy local specificity. In fact, the local calendar was made up of several different kinds of calendar relating to the range of experience within village life, from work and leisure to parish or manor government. The relationship of one particular group within the community whose role was shaped by customary practice – the church ringers – to the local calendar is also examined.
Chapter 3 examines some aspects of the notion of legitimation and suggest that, in part, the collective action of the labouring poor which took place on certain customary dates until the mid-nineteenth century, was legitimated by reference to church and manor practice, particularly the annual state services which were celebrated in the parish church, and the structure of manorial organisation. Thus, parish perambulations during Rogation Week, Guy Fawkes night celebrations, and Oak Apple Day customs were reinforced. Chapter 4, by concentrating on an examination of harvest practices, considers the socially cohesive nature of custom and assesses its importance for the labouring poor. Chapter 5 illusrates the socially disruptive side of other customs and rituals and relates them to forms of collective action adopted during periods of more overtly politcal social protest, in particular the Captain Swing disturbances.
Wood gatherers whose actions had previously been legitimated by reference to custom found, during the later eighteenth century, that statute law had eroded their right and cast them in the role of wood stealer. Chapter 6 looks at the struggle between custom and law in the context of the poor's belief in a general customary right to collect wood for fuel. Chapter 7 deals with the suppression of many customs in the mid-nineteenth century, and describes the change from village feast to benefit club day (which transformed one of them). This chapter concludes with an account of the deliberate attempt to remodel some customs, such as the harvest home supper, to conform with and promote more acceptable values of sobriety and good order, and to recreate a kind of deferential community orderliness, supposed by some Victorian writers and painters to recall former times.
Contents
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