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‘Wee be black as Hell’: Ritual, Disguise and Rebellion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2009

Alun Howkins  and
Linda Merricks
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Extract

This essay began from a continuity, or perhaps a persistence. Working as historians and cultural critics in very different periods, early modern England and the nineteenth-century countryside, we have both been struck for some years by continuities of behaviour in situations of riot or disorder. At one level this was first pointed to in the work of E.P. Thompson and George Rude in relation to eighteenth-century riot. Both these writers argued that far from riot being a spontaneous, anarchic and random event it was nearly always structured and organised. Thompson in particular introduced, through the notion of ‘moral economy’, the idea that rioters shared ideas about ‘right’ which Were related to an earlier customary social and economic order. From a very different, but equally important perspective, we have both been profoundly influenced by the flowering of cultural studies associated with the work of Mikhail Bahktin, and cultural anthropology growing from the work of Victor Turner and Pierre Bourdieu. In these Writers we found arguments about boundaries and structures which were both erected and transgressed by rituals of various kinds. Finally, a very few historians working on riot and popular disorder have been struck by the same continuity, notably, Michael Beames in his study of Whiteboyism, and very recently, Andrew Charlesworth in the Pages of this journal. This brief essay will seek to illuminate our notion of continuity, using some of these ideas. It is offered not as a definitive piece, but rather as an interpretation of some of these materials.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 41 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes

1. Thompson's work has clearly gone much further than this especially in Customs in Common, London 1991Google Scholar, which has reshaped many aspects of this paper.

2. See particularly, Bahktin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington, 1984)Google Scholar; Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca, 1974)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1979).Google Scholar

3. Beames, Michael, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton, 1983)Google Scholar; Charlesworth, Andrew ‘An Agenda for Historical Studies of Rural Protest in Britain, 1750–1850, Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, II, 2, 1991.Google Scholar

4. See for example Turner, , Dramas, Chapter 1.Google Scholar

5. Bahktin, , Rabelais, Introduction.Google Scholar

6. Turner, , Dramas, pp. 231–4Google Scholar. For a complex and derailed discussion of parts of this see ‘The times of our lives’ in Sider, Gerald M., Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar

7. Davis, N. Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford 1965)Google Scholar; Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986)Google Scholar. There is now a huge literature inspired by aspects of Davis's work but it seems frightened to move beyond the narrowly ‘material’ in its analysis. Even a recent, and excellent, book like Jones, D. J. V., Rebecca's Children: A Study of Rural Society, Crime and Protest (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar, which centres upon a series of ‘crimes’ marked precisely by these kind of ritual elements, does not discuss them beyond ‘placing’ them in a context of earlier ‘folk’ customs. It should be said, though, that this is much better than most earlier accounts!

8. Phythian-Adams, C., ‘Ceremony and the Citizen’ in Clarke, Peter and Slack, Paul (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1550–1700 (London, 1972), and many others.Google Scholar

9. Hone, William, The Everyday Book, 2 Vols. (London, 1828)Google Scholar, is a convenient source for these customs although there are many others.

10. Sider, , Culture and Class, p. 94.Google Scholar

11. On rogation see Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common, pp. 96–114Google Scholar; on the assize see Hay, Douglas ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ in Hay, Douglas et al. , Albion's Fatal Tree, (London, 1975)Google Scholar; James, M. E., ‘The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising 1569’, Past and Present, 60.Google Scholar

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14. Ibid., p. 55.

15. Ibid.

16. Chambers, E. K., The Medieval English Stage, 2 vols., (London, 1903), chapters VIII and IX.Google Scholar

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18. Ludus Coventri or the Plaie called Corpus Christi, E.E.T.S., (London, 1922), p. 19.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. 287.

20. Ibid., p. 375.

21. Ibid., p. 287.

22. Twycross, Meg and Carpenter, Sarah, ‘Purpose and Effects of Masking’Google Scholar in Happe, , Medieval English Drama, p. 176Google Scholar. See also Napier, A. David, Masks, Transformation and Paradox, (Berkeley, 1986), p. 29.Google Scholar

23. Ludus Coventri, p. 227.Google Scholar

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25. Twycross, and Carpenter, , ‘Purpose and Effects’, p. 173.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., p. 175.

27. Ibid., p. 176.

28. For an introduction to this idea see Segal, Julia, Phantasy in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1985).Google Scholar

29. See Owst, G. R., Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, 1966), p. 458.Google Scholar

30. Napier, , Masks, p. 16.Google Scholar

31. Royal Commission on the Establishment of an Efficient Constabidary Force in the Countries of England and Wales (1839) cmd. 169, p. 48.Google Scholar

32. There is now a considerable literature in English around this topic but the ‘key’ text for us is Thompson, E. P., ‘Rough Music’Google Scholar in Customs in Common. This is far more than a translation of his earlier article in French and summarises most of the recent literature in passing!

33. Davis, , Society, pp. 149–51.Google Scholar

34. Brigden, S., ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, Past and Present, no. 95.Google Scholar

35. Report of the Constabidary Force Commissioners, p. 48Google Scholar. See also the excellent account in Jones, Rosemary A. N., ‘Popular Culture, Policing and the Disappearance of the Ceffyl Pren in Cardigan’, Ceredigion XI, 1 (1988–1989)Google Scholar and Jones, , Rebecca's Children, pp. 195–8.Google Scholar

36. Faith, R. J., ‘The “Great rumour” of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’, The English Rising of 1381, Past and Present Society (Oxford, 1981), pp. 24–5.Google Scholar

37. This is clearly a matter of interpretation but see for example Coram Rege, Roll Michaelmas 5 Richards II in Dobson, R. B., The Peasants Revolt of 1381 (London, 1983), pp. 288–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cacophony, banners and processions were also key parts of the revolt.

38. The Statutes at Large I Ed. IV to the End of the Reign of Elizabeth, Vol. II, London, 1786Google Scholar, I Hen VII c. VII. We are grateful to John Gurney for this Reference.

39. MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘Kett's Rebellion in Context’, Past and Present, no. 84Google Scholar; Dymond, David, ‘A Lost Social Institution: The Camping Close’, Rural History, Economy, Society, Culture, I, 2 (1990), 181.Google Scholar

40. Walter., J., ‘“A Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, Past and Present, 107, 91–3.Google Scholar

41. Dymond, , ‘A Lost Social Institution’, pp. 181–2.Google Scholar

42. Sharp, Buchanan, In Contempt of All Authority (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 100 ff.Google Scholar

43. Underdown, David, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

44. Winstanley, Gerrard, A New Years Gift for Parliament and the Army (1650) in Hill, Christopher (ed.), The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 206.Google Scholar

45. Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters (London, 1973), pp. 142–6.Google Scholar

46. Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1769), IV, 144.Google Scholar

47. Ibid.

48. Jones, David, Before Rebecca, Popular Protest in Wales 1793–1835 (London, 1973), pp. 102–5.Google Scholar

49. Charlesworth, Andrew, An Atlas of Rural Protests in Britain, 1548–1900 (London, 1983), p. 157.Google Scholar

50. Beames, Michael, Peasants and Poicer: The Whiteboy Movements and their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton, 1983) pp. 97–101Google Scholar has a brief but well informed discussion of the Whiteboy Movements in terms of ritual.

51. Williams, David, The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 1955), pp. 186–7Google Scholar. Williams' account is now supplemented by the more recent one of Jones, D. J. V., Rebecca's ChildrenGoogle Scholar, cited above. His account of the events at Efail-wen is contained on pp. 204–7.

52. Williams, , Rebecca Riots, p. 188.Google Scholar

53. Home Office Papers, 1842, Public Record Office (hereafter HO) HO 45/454.

54. Williams, , Rebecca Riots, p. 191.Google Scholar

55. HO 45/454.

56. Williams, , Rebecca Riots, pp. 255ff.Google Scholar; see also Jones, , Rebecca's Children, Chapter 7.Google Scholar

57. Jones, , Rebecca's ChildrenGoogle Scholar, chapter 6 called, significantly, ‘Rebecca the Redresser’.

58. Jones, David, ‘The Second Rebecca Riots: A Study of Poaching on the River Wye’, Llafur, 2, 1.Google Scholar

59. Eastern Weekly Press (Norwich) 18 08 1894.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., 27 August 1910.

61. Sharp, , In Contempt, p. 105.Google Scholar

62. Jones, , Before Rebecca, chapters 3 and 4.Google Scholar

63. Napa, , Masks, Transformation and Paradox, p. 16.Google Scholar

64. Beames, , Peasants and Pozver, p. 101.Google Scholar

65. Thompson, , Customs in Common, p. 103.Google Scholar

66. Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London, 1992), p. 32Google Scholar. It must be stressed that this is only one part of Garber's complicated argument. See also Ackroyd, Peter, Dressing Up. Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession (London, 1979)Google Scholar, chapter 3; Kirk, Kris and Heath, Ed, Men in Frocks (London, 1984)Google Scholar. We are grateful to Andy Medhurst for these references.