Customs in Common Read online

  CUSTOMS IN COMMON

  By the same author:

  WILLIAM MORRIS

  THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS

  WHIGS AND HUNTERS

  POVERTY OF THEORY

  WRITING BY CANDLELIGHT

  THE HEAVY DANCERS

  WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST

  MAKING HISTORY

  THE ROMANTICS

  Copyright © 1993 by E. P. Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  First published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 1992

  This paperback edition published by The New Press, 1993

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-216-8 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thompson, E. P. (Edward Palmer), 1924–1993

  Customs in common : studies in traditional popular culture / E.P.

  Thompson.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. England—Social conditions—18th century.2. England—Popular culture—History—18th century.3. England—Social life and customs—18th century.4. Working class—England—History—18th century.5. England—Economic conditions—18th century. I.Title.

  HN398.E5T481992

  306’.0942'09033—dc20

  92-13039

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  I Introduction: Custom and Culture

  II The Patricians and the Plebs

  III Custom, Law and Common Right

  IV The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

  V The Moral Economy Reviewed

  VI Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism

  VII The Sale of Wives

  VIII Rough Music

  Index

  to Martin Eve

  uncommon customer

  List of Illustrations

  IWoolcombers’ trade union ticket, 1725. (PRO., KB 1.3.).

  IIAmicable Society of Woolstaplers, 1785. (Kidderminster Reference Library).

  IIIWoolcombers’ trade union ticket, 1835. (Bradford Reference Library).

  IVThe Pillory in its Glory, 1765 (Martin Eve, Merlin Press).

  VA lampoon of a clerical magistrate, 1800. (PRO., KB 1.30, (Part Two), Easter 40 Geo. III, no. 2).

  VILast dying words of another clerical magistrate. (PRO., KB 1.30 (Part Two, 41 Geo. III, no. 1, enclosed with affidavit of the Reverend Thomas Lane, JP, 17 November 1800)).

  VIIThe Pluralist and Old Soldier. (“Tim Bobbin”). (Manchester Central Reference Library, 1766 broadside).

  VIIIThe tradition of consumer protection (J. Penketham, Artachthos (1638, republished 1765)).

  IXBeating the bounds of Richmond (Two Historical Accounts of the Making of the New Forest and of Richmond New Park, 1751).

  XForestallers Crop-Sick. (Woodward, May 1801). (M. D. George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Political and Personal Satires, VIII, item 9721).

  XIHints to Forestallers. (I. Cruikshank? August 1800) (M. D. George, Catalogue, VIII, item 9547).

  XIIA Legal Method of Thrashing Out Grain. (I. Cruikshank, August 1800). (M. D. George, Catalogue, VII, item 9545).

  XIIIThe Farmers’ Toast. (Williams, March 1801. M. D. George, Catalogue, VIII, item 9717).

  XIVPhysiognomy: Landlord and Farmer. (Woodward, 1801, M. D. George, Catalogue, VIII, item 9723).

  XVMonopolizers Caught in their Own Trap. (Williams, May 1801). (M. D. George, Catalogue, VIII, item 9720).

  XVIOld Friends with New Faces. (Woodward, c. October 1801). (M. D. George, Catalogue, VIII, item 9731).

  XVIIaThe Butter Cross at Witney. (Photo: Wendy Thwaites).

  XVIIbThe Corn Market at Ledbury. (Author’s photo).

  XVIIINeptune Yard, Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (Department of Photography, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne).

  XIXPlaster relief at Montacute House: I.

  XXPlaster relief at Montacute House: II.

  XXIBurning the Rumps at Temple Bar. (From Hogarth’s illustrations to Butler’s “Hudibras”, 1726).

  XXIIHogarth’s Skimmington. (Hogarth’s illustrations to “Hudibras”).

  XXIIIDr. Syntax with the Skimerton Riders. (Rowlandson’s illustrations to Combe’s “Dr. Syntax”, 1812).

  XXIVA Summons for Horn Fair. (British Library, press-mark C 121, g 9).

  XXVAnother Summons. (British Library, press-mark 1851 d 9 P 91).

  XXVIThe Dorset Ooser. (Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, monograph 2, Dorchester 1968).

  XXVIIRiding the Stang. (Thomas Miller, Our Old Town (1857)).

  XXVIIIA Lewbelling Band and Dummies (Illustrated London News, 14 August 1909).

  XXIXJohn Hobbs, John Hobbs. (Lord Crawford).

  XXXA Wife Sale. (Lord Crawford).

  XXXIA tethered wife. ([F. Macdonagh], L’Hermite de Londres (Paris, 1821)).

  XXXIIHow the French and Germans View the English. (Punch, 27 April 1867).

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  The studies in this book were intended as a single closely-related argument. This argument is rehearsed in the Introduction. It has, however, taken much longer to complete than I could ever have intended. It commenced — the work on “time” and on “the moral economy” — soon after I published The Making of the English Working Class over twenty years ago. Then it was delayed by work on eighteenth-century crime, which resulted in Whigs and Hunters and (with colleagues in the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Social History) Albion’s Fatal Tree. Then, in the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and intellectual life. These difficulties (as well as ill health) seriously delayed the completion of Customs in Common.

  I should explain now what I have done to make a consecutive argument. Two chapters are reproduced with no change from earlier publication. These are “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, first published in Past and Present, no. 38, December 1967, and “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, no. 50, 1971. In the first case, while interesting new work has been done on the question of time, none of it seemed to call for any major revisions to my article. I have left “the moral economy” to stand for a different reason. The thesis has been much discussed, criticised and developed, and at some points overtaken by subsequent research. At first I laboured to revise and to up-date it. But this proved to be a hopeless task. It was a kind of retrospective moving of the goal-posts. I found that I was modifying a text upon which much commentary by other scholars had been hung. I have therefore republished the original study and have written a quite new study, of greater length, “The Moral Economy Reviewed”, in which I respond to some critics and reflect upon the issues raised by others.

  The other studies in the book have either been extensively revis
ed or appear here for the first time. The “Introduction” and “Patricians and Plebs” include passages which first appeared in “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture”, Journal of Social History, Vol. 7, no. 4, summer 1974, and “Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?”, Social History, Vol. 3, no. 2, May 1978. A shorter version of “Rough Music” appeared as “‘Rough Music’: Le Charivari anglais” in Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 27e Année, no. 2, Mars-Avril 1972. I am grateful to the editors and journals concerned for allowing me to draw upon this material.

  I am grateful also to those institutions and those colleagues who have afforded me hospitality and the opportunity to teach and to keep in touch with the historical profession over this long period. These include several American universities (Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Brown, Dartmouth College), as well as a circuit of Indian universities and the Sir Douglas Robb lectures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. More recently I am especially grateful to three universities which took the risk of inviting me as a visitor — rusty as I was — and enabled me to rehabilitate myself as a scholar, after the long diversion of the peace movement years. These were, first, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (1988); the University of Manchester, which awarded me a Simon Senior Research Fellowship in 1988-89; and Rutgers University, which appointed me as Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished Visiting Professor in 1989-90, working with the Center for Historical Analysis. Without this generous assistance, and the stimulus of congenial colleagues, I might have lost touch with my trade. Finally, my warm thanks are due to the University of Birmingham, for affording to me library and research facilities as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities.

  If I were to thank everyone who has sent me references (for example of rough music or of wife sales) this preface would be several pages longer. In some cases I have acknowledged donors in my footnotes. I must beg forgiveness for overlooking others. Among those who have passed on information or who have exchanged views are: John Beattie, the late Kathleen Bumstead, Andrew Charlesworth, Robin Clifton, Penelope Corfield, Anna Davin, Natalie Davis, Isabel Emmett, the late G. Ewart Evans, John Fine, John Fletcher, Vic Gammon, John Gillis, Inge Goodwin, Jack Goody, the late Herbert Gutman, Julian Harber, Brian Harrison, J. F. C. Harrison, Martin Ingram, Joan Lane, Louis Mackay, the late David Morgan, Polly Morris, Bryan Palmer, Alfred Peacock, Iorwerth Prothero, Arnold Rattenbury, Ruth Richardson, John Rule, Raphael Samuel, Peter Searby, Robert Shenton, Paul Slack, Len Smith, Michael Sonenscher, Joan Thirsk, Keith Thomas, Dror Wahrman, John Walsh, E. R. Yarham, Eileen and Stephen Yeo. Very particular thanks are due to the late E. E. Dodd, who undertook many searches for me in the Public Record Office, and to Malcolm Thomas (now Librarian at Friends House, Euston Road) whose gifted services I was once fortunate to have as a research assistant; to Adrian Randall, Wendy Thwaites and John Walter, for acute commentary on my “moral economy” texts; to Douglas Hay and Peter Linebaugh, formerly co-editors of Albion’s Fatal Tree, for advice on the law, on crime, and on many other matters; to Robert Malcolmson and to Rex Russell, for their generosity in passing on references as to wife sales and agrarian matters; to Roy Palmer, for sharing his inexhaustible and expert knowledge of ballad and broadside literature; to Nicholas Rogers, for keeping me in touch with his outstanding work-in-progress on the London and provincial crowd; and to Jeanette Neeson, whose work on eighteenth-century Commoners — soon to be published — will transform the understanding of that century’s agrarian and social history, and to whose insights I am deeply indebted. Further particular thanks are due to Eveline King, who has skilfully deciphered and typed my much-corrected manuscript; to two friends over many years, who are also my publishers — in the United States, André Schiffrin, until recently the directing inspiration of Pantheon Books, before this was made impossible by the philistine policies of Random House — and in Britain, Martin Eve of Merlin Press, who has come to my aid in every difficulty. Both have been extraordinarily patient and encouraging in the face of my long delays. Finally, Dorothy Thompson, who has been my fellow-worker and who has shared my interests for more than four decades, has commented on each chapter as it came from the typewriter. Without her help, of many kinds, this book would not have been completed.

  My thanks are also due to the libraries and county record offices acknowledged in my footnotes. These include, of course, the British Library, the British Museum Print Room, and the Public Record Office. Transcripts of Crown-Copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of H. M. Stationery Office, and my thanks are due for permission to reproduce Plates V and VI. My thanks are also due to the Librarian of Cecil Sharp house; to the marquess of Cholmondeley (for permission to draw upon the Cholmondeley (Houghton) papers, now in the Cambridge University Library); to the Librarian, the William L. Clement Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, for permission to consult the Shelburne Papers; to the Rt. Hon. the Earl St. Aldwyn (for the papers of Charles Withers); to His Grace, the duke of Marlborough (for the papers of the earl of Sunderland at Blenheim Palace); to Lord Crawford, for permission to reproduce Plates XXIX and XXX, and to all other sources acknowledged in the footnotes and text. The passage (see p. 127) from A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1986) is cited by permission of Oxford University Press. My thanks also go to the British Library and British Museum Print Room for permission to reproduce materials in their collections as illustrations.

  Worcester, December 1990

  Chapter One

  Introduction: Custom and Culture

  All the studies in this book are connected by different paths with the theme of custom as it was expressed within the culture of working people in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. It is my thesis that customary consciousness and customary usages were especially robust in the eighteenth century: indeed, some “customs” were of recent invention, and were in truth claims to new “rights”. Historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have tended to see the eighteenth century as a time when these customary usages were in decline, along with magic, witchcraft and kindred superstitions. The people were subject to pressures to “reform” popular culture from above, literacy was displacing oral transmission, and enlightenment (it is supposed) was seeping down from the superior to the subordinate orders.

  But the pressures of “reform” were stubbornly resisted, and the eighteenth century saw a profound distance opened, a profound alienation between the culture of patricians and plebs. Peter Burke, in his illuminating study of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) suggests that this distance was a European-wide phenomenon, and that one consequence was the emergence of folklore, as sensitive (and insensitive) observers in the upper ranks of society sent out exploring parties to inspect the “Little Tradition” of the plebs, and to record their strange observances and rituals. Already, as the study of folklore emerged, these usages were coming to be seen as “antiquities” or survivals, and the great pioneer of folklore, John Brand, thought it necessary to preface his Observations on Popular Antiquities with an apology for attending to them at all:

  . . . nothing can be foreign to our enquiry, much less beneath our notice, that concerns the smallest of the Vulgar; of those little Ones who occupy the lowest place, though by no means of the least importance in the political arrangement of human Beings.1

  John Brand and Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities (1813), Vol. I, p. xxi. (Brand’s Preface is dated 1795.)

  Thus folklore at its very origin carried this sense of patronising distance, of subordination (Brand noted that pride and the necessities of civil Polity had “portioned out the human Genus into. . . a variety of different and subordinate Species”), and of customs as survivals. For 150 years the preferred methodology of collectors was to group such survivals as “calendar customs”, which found their last refuge in the deepest countryside. As one folklorist wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, his object was to describe: br />
  The old customs which still linger on in the obscure nooks and corners of our native land, or which have survived the march of progress in our busy city’s life.2

  P. H. Ditchfield, Old English Customs extant at the Present Time (1896), Preface.

  To such collectors we are indebted for careful descriptions of well-dressings or rush-bearings or harvest homes or, indeed, late examples of skimmington ridings. But what was lost, in considering (plural) customs as discrete survivals, was any strong sense of custom in the singular (although with many forms of expression), custom not as post-anything but as sui generis — as ambience, mentalité, and as a whole vocabulary of discourse, of legitimation and of expectation.

  In earlier centuries the term “custom” was used to carry much of what is now carried by the word “culture”. Custom was man’s “second nature”. Francis Bacon wrote of custom as induced and habitual inertial behaviour: “Men Profess, Protest, Engage, Give Great Words, and then Doe just as they have Done before. As if they were Dead Images, and Engines moved onely by the Wheeles of Custome.” For Bacon, then, the problem was to induce better habits and as early in life as possible:

  Since Custom is the principal Magistrate of Man’s Life, let Men, by all Means, endeavour to obtain good Customs. . . Custom is most perfect when it beginneth in young Years; This we call Education, which is, in Effect, but an early Custom.

  Bacon was not thinking of the labouring people, but one hundred years later Bernard Mandeville, who was quite as convinced as was Bacon of the “Tyranny which Custom usurps over us”,1 was a great deal less well-disposed towards any universal provision of education. It was necessary that “great multitudes of People” should “inure their Bodies to Work” both for themselves and to support the more fortunate in Idleness, Ease and Pleasure:

  Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Harmondsworth, 1970 edn.), p. 191: also p. 334.