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ABSTRACT
One of the most important practices associated with rough music, the effigy-burning of unpopular neighbours, was still practiced widely in mid-nineteenth century England, including on the Fifth of November, or Guy Fawkes Night. But once the Fifth became transformed by new patronage, the practice of effigy-burning became the object of criticism and policing and generally declined after 1900. It had undergone a steady stream of criticism in the press and in the magistrates’ courts and was by the twentieth century regarded as a cultural anachronism. Meanwhile the Fifth of November, which had always been a day of entertainment, was increasingly embraced by commercialism after 1918.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Dr Andrew Walker who has made a number of helpful suggestions towards improving this article. I am also grateful for the encouragement of Dr Mike Winstanley, Professor Keith Laybourn, Dr Elizabeth Roberts and especially my wife, Maryse and middle son, William.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 My thanks to the British Library, Gale and the British Newspaper Archive website: www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.
2 A. Walker, ‘Rough Music, Community Protest and the Local Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, International Journal of Regional and Local History 13, no. 1 (2018): 86–104.
3 See J. Mussell, ‘Digitization’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. A. King, A. Easley, and J. Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 17–28 and J. Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). I owe these references to Dr A. Walker.
4 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: The Merlin Press 1991), 528–9; S. Banks, Informal Justice in England and Wales, 1760–1914: The Courts of Popular Opinion (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 202–3. The role of social indoctrination emphasised by J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976), 92–4, 101 – also the increasing role of women in organised religion, 179; and of schooling by R.W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society,1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 151–2, and J.S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860–1918 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 189; D. Vincent, ‘The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture’, in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England, ed. R.D. Storch (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 20–47.
5 R.D. Storch, ‘Please to Remember the Fifth of November: Conflict, Solidarity and Public Order in Southern England 1815–1900’, in R.D. Storch, Ibid., 75–85.
6 D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xiv, 104, 180. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p’b. 1996, 146–52, 183–6.
7 Known as skimmington in the south-west, riding the stang and sometimes rantanning, in the north, lowbelling in the south Midlands; see Walker, ‘Rough Music, Community Protest’, 88–9.
8 Leeds Mercury, 6 November 1875.
9 I. Favretto and X. Itçaina, eds., Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2–3.
10 This point is owed to Dr Walker, who found a total of 2224 cases of all rough music between 1851 and 1900, see Walker, ‘Rough Music’, 99.
11 Westmorland Gazette, 20 May 1865 from January 1827; Cheshire Observer, 14 November 1863.
12 Devon and Exeter Gazette, 5 December 1890.
13 H.J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 32.
14 Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, 100.
15 Saltney and Hoole at Chester; Compton Street, Northampton.
16 P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 160–1, 163; Thompson, Customs, 528–9. Banks, Informal Justice, 167–8, 170–1.
17 Hedon, Hull Packet, 25 January 1867; Axholme, ‘Observer’; Hull, Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 14 April 1865.
18 ‘Plebeian’ is used here, following Storch and others, to indicate the lower orders – labourers, artisans, small shopkeepers – especially in a rural or small-town setting.
19 Banks, Informal Justice, 29–31; see G. Pearson, Hooligan. A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983), 143–53. English lynch law was the instantaneous popular punishment of publicly-observed cruelty, less commonly applied after 1870.
20 C.J. Griffin, ‘Affecting Violence: Language, Gesture and Performance in Early Nineteenth-Century English Popular Protest’, Historical Geography 36 (2008): 139–62.
21 Morning Post, 31 July 1834.
22 In a survey of 140 cases of rough music against cruelty or immorality, between 1851 and 1890, 91% of the perpetrators and 75% of those targeted were labourers, craft workers or shop workers or their wives.
23 T. Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine, 2 July 1883.
24 Walker, ‘Rough Music’, 97–8; Chelmsford Chronicle, 24 May 1833.
25 The Examiner, 19 June 1831; Westmorland Gazette, 17 November 1838.
26 Leeds Mercury, 1 June 1839; Hull Packet, 1 October 1841; Walker, ‘Rough Music’, 97; Leeds Times, 23 & 30 April 1842.
27 Leicestershire Mercury, 21 August 1852.
28 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 28 June 1851.
29 Huddersfield Chronicle, 20 September 1851.
30 D.Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6; Manchester Courier, 29 September 1855; North Devon Journal, 19 September 1850.
31 Northern Daily Mail, 7 February 1893; Northern Echo, 5 September 1873. ‘Hottentots’ quoted in Storch, Popular Culture and Custom, Introduction.
32 North Devon Journal, 9 February 1928; Liverpool Daily Post, 30 September 1867.
33 D. Philips and R.D. Storch, Policing Provincial England, 1829–56: The Politics of Reform (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999), 26, 30.
34 Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 27 March, 1856.
35 Woolmer’s Exeter & Plymouth Gazette, 4 January 1851.
36 Banks, Informal Justice, 198.
37 Huddersfield Chronicle, 21 November 1857; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 24 August 1865. Birmingham Daily Post, 26 August 1871.
38 Bristol Mercury, 16 October 1890; The Cornishman, 10 February 1887.
39 Banks, Informal Justice, 195–6.
40 Chester Chronicle, 24 November 1860; Bedford Assizes, Cambridge Independent Press, 22 March 1856; Yorkshire Assizes, York Herald, 21 March 1868.
41 C.A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 23–4, 41; O. Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 117.
42 Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 3 July 1863.
43 Western Times, 27 November 1858; Portsmouth Evening News, 21 October 1889.
44 D.G. Barrie and S. Broomhall, Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Vol I, Magistrates, media and the masses (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 209–10.
45 Preston Guardian, 23 & 30 August 1873, and 1 August 1874; Huddersfield Chronicle, 2 July 1864; Darlington and Stockton Times, 23 November 1867, as found by Chris Lloyd, Northern Echo, 24 November 2017.
46 Norwich Sessions, Norfolk Chronicle, 2 April 1853; Essex County Chronicle, 19 November 1886.
47 Western Gazette, 30 November 1883; Hertford Mercury, 23 June 1855.
48 Liverpool Daily Post, 30 September 1867. In fact, English lynch law was unplanned, not dignified by any of the ritual of rough music and has been excluded from the figures in this study.
49 Cheshire Observer, 3 September 1870.
50 Hampshire Advertiser, 8 January 1870; Ipswich Journal, 8 January 1876.
51 D. Taylor, ‘Protest and Consent in the Policing of the “Wild West” Riding of Yorkshire, c.1850–1875: “The Police v. The People’”, Northern History (LI, 2014): 296–302.
52 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 24 August & 18 September 1865.
53 Leeds Times, 9 July 1881; Banks, Informal Justice, 194–5.
54 Western Times, 14 January 1870.
55 A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), 110–11.
56 Banks, Informal Justice, 29; Bath Chronicle, 7 May 1863; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 27 February 1875.
57 H. Cunningham, Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England since 1700. Studies in Popular Culture, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), Chapter 4.
58 For use of the Fifth for burnings of the locally ‘obnoxious’, see J. Roper, ‘The Ad Hoc Calendarized: (on the Basis of November 5th Effigy-Burning in Southern England)’, Western Folklore 74 (2015): 170–75, 177. N.B. Localisation of guys was most common in, but by no means exclusive to, southern England.
59 R.D. Storch, Please to remember, 82, in R.D. Storch, ed., Popular Culture and Custom.
60 J.E. Etherington, ‘The Lewes Bonfire Riots of 1847’, in Sussex History (1, 1978); Mike Jay in Brenda Buchanan and others, Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 years of Bonfire Night (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2005), Chapter 5, Bonfire Night in Lewes.
61 In contrast with Ulster, see J. McConnel, ‘Remembering the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in Ireland, 1605–1920’, Journal of British Studies 50 (2011): 888.
62 R.D. Storch, Please to remember, 73, 81.
63 Yorkshire Evening Post, 5 November 1901.
64 Walworth, Kentish Mercury, 8 November 1879; Burnham, Essex County Chronicle, 11 November 1898; Wadhurst, Sussex Agricultural Express, 10 November 1900.
65 For the contrasting metropolitan, radical workers’ views, see R. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972).
66 E.g. about ‘lewbelling’, Penny Illustrated Paper, 21 August 1909.
67 M. Peacock, ‘Burial in Effigy’, Folklore (16, 1905): 405–6, 463–4.
68 Billericay, Essex County Chronicle, 11 November 1904; Daily Mirror, 6 November 1908.
69 Yorkshire Evening Post, 7 November 1913. For Ally Sloper, see Lincoln Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 11 November 1892, and for Bill Bailey, Sussex Agricultural Express, 12 November 1904.
70 E.g. seizing guys on the Fifth at Boxted, Essex Newsman, 23 November 1912.
71 However, Walker found a decline in the participation of the young in rough music and riding the stang by the 1890s; ‘Rough Music’, 99–100.
72 The Globe, 5 November 1913.
73 Sussex Agricultural Express, 17 November 1906; Western Times, 9 November 1907; Illustrated Police News, 12 November 1910.
74 R. Lawton, ‘Rural Depopulation in Nineteenth Century England, 195’, in English Rural Communities, ed. D.R. Mills (London: Macmillan, 1973).
75 Eds., D. Fox and A. Woolf, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press online, 2018), Chapter 9, B. Bushaway, ‘Things Said or Sung a Thousand Times’, 272–4; A. Knevett and V. Gammon, ‘English Folk Song Collectors and the Idea of the Peasant’, Folk Music Journal (2016): 11, 57; K.D.M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 474.
76 Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 27 October 1915; Dublin Daily Express, 28 December 1915; Sporting Times, 28 October 1916.
77 Northampton Chronicle, 3 November 1925. S. Easton, A. Howkins, S. Laing, L. Merrick, & H. Walker, Disorder and Discipline. Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present Day (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1988), 72–3.
78 J. Nott, Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918–1960, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 23–4, 30.
79 Essex Chronicle, 1 June 1945.
80 A-M. Kilday and D. Nash, Shame and Modernity in Britain: 1890 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Introduction, 1–19. ‘Guy Fawkes’ became a British silent film in 1923 based on Harrison Ainsworth’s novel of 1840.
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Philip J. Gooderson
Dr Philip J. Gooderson, MA (Cantab), MA, PhD (Lancaster), MEd (Manchester) is a retired schoolmaster. His other published writings include, Lord Linoleum, Lord Ashton, Lancaster and the Rise of the British Oilcloth and Linoleum Industry, Keele University Press, 1995 and Gangs of Birmingham, From the Sloggers to the Peaky Blinders, Milo Books, 2010.