This issue of Rural History has greater thematic coherence than previous numbers, with all the papers having some relation to the study of ‘popular culture’, while coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Each of the articles develops a key area of analysis, but their juxtaposition helps to raise further questions – about the kinds of sources that can be used to redress the bias towards the elite that has tended to dominate the study of culture, and about the problems involved in the handling of such sources. How do concepts of class, sectional, or gender interest relate to the sense of place and local identity? How can we detect such ideas within the historical record? How should we proceed in attempting to reconstruct popular and regional consciousness?

For the vast majority of men and women in seventeenth-century England the act of marriage created an indissoluble union and represented a life long commitment. Legal divorce was a lengthy and costly procedure which discriminated against women, and informal separations or desertions were socially frowned upon and often economically disadvantageous. So marital discord had to be overcome before it deteriorated into a situation of marriage breakdown. Elaborate ways of restoring and maintaining marital harmony were established through use of the cucking stool and ‘charivari’. By these means, public attention was focused upon behaviour which caused discord: the scolding wife was punished and the husband who was a cuckold or had been beaten by his wife, humiliated. Meanwhile, conduct books proffered advice to couples on how to avoid such marital discontent and its consequences.

In one of the earliest issues of Rural History, Jacqueline Simpson urged students of Popular rural culture to examine local legends that centre upon some specific place, Person or object and which are a focus for local pride. Many of these are well-known tales which have been adapted, often in a humorous way, to local circumstances. Thus the seventy-odd stories of dragon-slaying which she has collected for Britain usually depict a local figure, not St George or a knight errant, as the hero. It is normally difficult, if not impossible, to explain how these tales began. The Dragon of Wantley, however, offers some unusual opportunities for delving into the historical context of a ballad that achieved national fame.

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.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914 landowners in Sussex immediately started to employ their local leadership roles in the cause of voluntary recruiting and in doing so demonstrated the continuing utility of paternalistic social relations and the traditional rural structure to a nation preparing for war. The slow decline in social prestige provided by landownership was far from visible in the military sphere. As members of the military establishment – regular and territorial, past and present – landowners with clearly identifiable local economic, political and leisure interests attended to the search for recruits with the age old expectation that the deferential labourers would follow their ‘betters’ to war. As Alun Howkins has written,‘men were urged to go as much as part of their duty to the social structure of rural areas as to King and Country’.

Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related groups. The ‘folk’ in the old sense of a group of people distinguishable by class, education or location therefore disappears from the modern equation, for it follows that we are all folk. As academic folklorists use the term nowadays, ‘folklore’ is best seen as a ‘cultural register’ – on the analogy of a linguistic register – one of several options available to members of a cultural grouping for thought, activity and interaction. It follows that ‘folklore’ can be found anywhere and among any group of people, urban as well as rural, professional as well as ‘peasant’.