the cultures of the people in early modern england

The Cultures of the People in Early Modern EnglandPopular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850 by Tim Harris; The Rise and Fall of Merry England:The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 by Ronald Hutton; Poverty and Piety in an English Village:Terling, 1525-1700 by Keith Wrightson; David Levine; The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725 by Margaret SpuffordReview by: Barry ReayJournal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 467-472Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175896 .

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These are questions that bear directly on major topics in British historiography: what were the cultural resources that promoted Britain's distinctive industrial activity, or how did science in Britain work with Protestantism to promote nationalism? Nationalism and industrialization have become topics reserved to the general historian, but it just may be the case that part of the picture is missing when scientific and technologi- cal styles are left out of the discussion of either nationalism or industrialization. I recently did a survey on H-Albion, the British and Irish history discussion group on the Internet, asking some 1,500 colleagues in British history if they tried to integrate science into the narrative of Stuart history. Two respondents kindly informed me what they did. There was nothing "scientific" about the survey, but I suspect that it was telling. Historians of British science bear responsibility here. We have been busy creating a lively and dynamic historiography; we just have not always been at our best in taking the time to tell our colleagues about what has been accomplished.

MARGARET C. JACOB University of Pennsylvania

The Cultures of the People in Early Modern England

Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850. Edited by TIM HARRIS. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Pp. xi+293. $45.00.

The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700. By RONALD HUTTON. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+366. $26.00.

Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700. By KEITH WRIGHTSON and DAVID LEVINE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+241. $24.00.

The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725. Edited by MARGARET SPUF- FORD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xx+459. $79.95.

The bipolar or binary model of cultural configurations in early modern England is being slowly replaced by a newer interpretation that stresses diversity and multiplicity. Although the emphases have varied, and most accounts have allowed for overlap and interaction, the bipolar approach to cultural history saw the past in terms of a basic division

























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between "elite" and "popular." It was a governing trope in Peter Burke's influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe and in Rob- ert Muchembled's Culture populaire et culture des elites dans la France moderne.1 More recent accounts, influenced by the effect of late twentieth-century cultural studies, have challenged the usefulness of viewing early modern societies in terms of a simple cultural polarity. This critique can be seen most clearly in Roger Chartier's research on early modern France, which explicitly rejects the "popular" in favor of "fluid circula- tions, practices shared by various groups, and blurred distinctions." "When, on the one hand, the concept of popular culture obliterates the bases shared by the whole of society and when, on the other, it masks the plurality of cleavages that differentiate cultural practices, it cannot be held as pertinent to a comprehension of the forms and materials that characterise the cultural universe of societies in the modem period."2 Thus we need to take into account not only shared cultural values, or "collective culture," but also a multiplicity of cultural divisions: regional (indeed local), town versus country, religious, gender, age, and occupa- tional. Power is not ignored in such analyses, but the division between dominant and subordinate is not a primary unit of analysis or a structural principle.

Early modern historians have little difficulty "problematizing" popular culture, and some would doubtless favor the plural "popular cultures." Yet few would go so far as to excise the term altogether. Tim Harris's new book is an excellent example of this impasse. One chapter (Bob Bushaway's "Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-Century Rural En- gland") favors a bipolar approach. Another, David Underdown's rather patchy contribution, defines popular culture in terms of the binary model but then immediately rejects this definition for one of "overlapping sub- cultures" as a way of exploring regional variation. Others sidestep most of the issues. Roy Porter's disappointing chapter on eighteenth-century medicine stresses interchange and overlap between "high" and "low" culture but then proceeds to discuss other matters. Patty Seleski's inter- esting account of domestic servants' resistance to middle-class domestic ideology and John Rule's chapter on male workshop custom deal with aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century working-class life but do not explicitly engage with the debate at all. However, there is much in the volume that implicitly challenges the usefulness of the term "popular culture." Indeed, the word "popular" could be removed from the head- ings of Susan Amussen's important chapter on the "limited subordina-

1 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; reprint, London, 1994); Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des elites dans la France moderne (Paris, 1978), published in English as Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985).

2 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 3-5. See also the stimulating essay by Robert Scribner, "Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?" History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 175-91.
















tion" of women and from Jonathan Barry's synthesis of recent work on the roles of literature and literacy without changing the message or effect of their contents; they deal (very effectively) with collective culture in early modern England. Martin Ingram's chapter covers popular religious cultures, but his is the most thoroughgoing critique (again implicit) of the utility of the elite-popular divide and of accounts that stress popular cultural homogeneity. Harris's own measured and incisive introduction, "Problematising Popular Culture," outlines problems of definition, evidence, methodology, cultural and social division, and historical change. Throughout the book there are references not only to "diversities," " complexities," "interaction," "variety," "pluralism," "contradic- tions," "fractions," "gender divisions," "ambiguities," and "cultural variations" but also to "overlapping . . . cultures," "overlapping sub- cultures," a "common culture," "shared meanings," and "interacting . . . cultures." Culture is "plural, variable and multivalent," "complex and contradictory," and marked by "complex, dynamic exchanges" and by "pluralism and fluid interchange." And yet despite these ostensible challenges to the two-tier model, Harris remains attached to popular culture as a useful shorthand term: he does not pursue the logic of his more forceful contributors and, one suspects, his own inclinations. As in the book's title, popular culture survives.

Ronald Hutton's focused study of the chronology of the ritual year in late medieval and early modern England provides a perspective absent from the Harris collection but vital to understanding early modem cultural configurations. The Rise and Fall of Merry England, which draws on hundreds of churchwardens' accounts (all the surviving ones to which Hutton could gain access) is a tour de force of English empiricism. Deftly, and almost unassumingly, Hutton has transformed the history of calendrical festivals by charting the ritual year on the eve of England's reformations, the limited effect of the Henrician reformation, the "devas- tating" effects of the Edwardian regime (p. 91), restoration of ritual un- der Mary in the 1550s, decline and struggle in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, assault during the 1640s and 1650s, and "compromise" at the Restoration (p. 261). Some readers will be put off by Hutton's philistine attitude toward theory (see p. 2), but this should not detract from the importance of his project. In a series of innovative studies, Hutton is establishing the dynamic nature of English seasonal rites, their continual shaping and reshaping, invention and reinvention. He has raised considerable doubt about the assumed pagan origins of most rites. Apart from the customary use of fire, which is almost certainly a pagan tradition, only two of the customs found in the Tudor ritual year-the giving of gifts at New Year and festival greenery-can be "documented in Pre-Christian times"; "although some of the rituals and customs carried on in early Tudor communities were very old, many had been either introduced or embellished only a few generations before or even within living memory" (pp. 51, 61).







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One objection to a heavy dependency on churchwardens' accounts in order relentlessly to chart change at a national level (indeed a weakness of Rise and Fall) is that the source provides a rather one-dimen- sional perspective of religious change, dealing overwhelmingly with the effect of reform from above. It can tell us, say, that a church's image of Saint George was removed; it cannot tell us what happened to the cluster of beliefs attached to that image (or for that matter to the image itself) once it left the church. But elsewhere Hutton has provided a glimpse of that added dimension through painstaking work with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folklore sources. Prereformation rites and beliefs survived England's reformations: "the most important and well-loved rituals of the late medieval church in England and Wales were reproduced in folk custom after they had been driven out of formal religion at the Reformation."3

The other weakness of national studies of churchwardens' accounts is that they give the illusion of grassroots history while being largely detached from the local context. The power dynamics of the local level and the complexities of community that lie behind the imposition and reception of any reform do not leap fully articulated from the records of ecclesiastical finance; they can only be detected and explored through the detailed microstudy. One of the most successful of such studies was Keith Wrightson and David Levine's Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700, reprinted in 1995 by Oxford University Press and with a new postscript by Keith Wrightson. In Wrightson's ex- tremely effective reply to the book's critics, it becomes clear just how influential Poverty and Piety has been. One of its most controversial aspects-dealt with at length in the postscript-has been Wrightson and Levine's exploration of the social appeal of Puritanism, the suggestion that the "hotter sort" of Protestantism held particular appeal to village elites, including what have come to be known as the "middling sort." Religious transformation meshed with social polarization as the "better sort" distanced themselves from the poor and attempted to control and reform the more unruly aspects of popular culture.4 The so-called Wright- son thesis, usually presented without the subtlety of its original formula- tion, stalks the work of the historians reviewed here: it is there in the introduction to Harris and in Hutton's conclusion. Reaction to Wrightson and Levine also lies behind a collaborative research project devised by Margaret Spufford ten years ago to combat what she has termed the "so-

3 Ronald Hutton, "The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore," Past and Present, no. 148 (1995): 113.

4 The literature on this is now quite extensive. For a case study that refers to the historiography, see Robert von Friedeburg, "Reformation of Manners and the Social Composition of Offenders in an East Anglian Cloth Village: Earls Colne, Essex, 1531- 1642," Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): 347-85. Wrightson's postscript also refers to those who have engaged with the argument.
















cial control" model of religious belief. The result is The World of Rural Dissenters.

The World of Rural Dissenters, a collection of essays by former graduate students of Margaret Spufford5 and by others with somewhat different connections to the editor, is an important but rather poorly struc- tured book. As Patrick Collinson observes in his incendiary device of a chapter-why did the editor include this critique?-there are really several books struggling to be heard. One is about the role of religion in early modern England and the link between reading and a basic religious knowledge: Spufford's view that "there was a deep interest in religious matters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which crossed all social divides" and that "if you could read, you were also religiously in- doctrinated" (pp. 3, 74). A subsidiary theme is about geographical mobil- ity and trade communications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the most coherent book, which the other chapters should have been jettisoned to preserve, is the one on rural dissent: the sustained argument that dissent was not socially or economically determined and included the "meaner sort of people," that nonconformists were fully integrated members of their local communities rather than alienated outcasts, and that dissent (different waves of dissent) persisted in families and core groups over several generations. "This stability, together with the nature of early sixteenth-century, and post-Restoration dissent, running com- pletely across the social spectrum, is our most important finding. It leads to the conclusion, which is of enormous importance to the history of religious dissent, that the dissenters themselves were integrated into their local communities in a way which we had not previously dreamt" (p. 37).

And so Derek Plumb discusses the ways in which the Lollards of the mid-Thames were "assimilated into their societies" (chaps. 2 and 3). Christopher Marsh's accomplished contribution demonstrates the Family of Love's acceptance in an early modern Cambridge parish (chap. 5). Nesta Evans establishes the persistence of dissenter surnames in the Chilterns over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Lol- lards to Quakers so to speak (chap. 7). Bill Stevenson charts the social composition and "social integration" of post-Restoration dissenters in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire (chaps. 8 and 9). This precision on the composition and context of dissent is to be welcomed. A degree of contributor overenthusiasm for the nov- elty of argument can be excused, as can a certain amount of misrepresen- tation of received opinion. However, we need to be clear about what

5 Spufford has attracted some talented graduate students, two of whom have already produced monographs of considerable importance. See Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630 (Cambridge, 1994); and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991).













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exactly has been shown. Here the tension between the linked but different agendas of the book emerges once more. Dissent in Rural Dissenters has two functions: as an object of inquiry in its own right and as a case study, a means of addressing Spufford's main preoccupation, the role of religion at the popular level. Obviously the two are not the same, although the editor collapses the categories in her opening section, "The Social and Economic Spectrum of Religious Belief," which is really about the social and economic spectrum of sectarian religious belief. Ru- ral Dissenters certainly shows that nonconformity was not limited to the middling sort (has anyone said that it was?); it does not prove that there was no social bias in dissent. It provides fascinating detail of the role of sectaries in their local communities; yet it is sometimes in danger of a somewhat blinkered dismissal of the sufferings of dissent. "Co-opera- tion" and "conflict" are not simple alternatives to describe sectaries' relationships with family and neighborhood. As Christopher Marsh has pointed out, with considerably more subtlety than some of his fellow contributors, "the Balsham Familists were not able to live as they did simply because they were powerful, nor because people were either igno- rant or apathetic concerning their unusual religion. The situation was more positive. We should . . . think in terms of a widespread though unarticulated belief that they had a justifiable claim to hold deviant religious views, as long as they did not hold them to the detriment of consen- sual moral and social expectations. This was a negotiated settlement, and one which suggests an impressive flexibility in the thought-world of ordi- nary villagers (and of ecclesiastical court judges)" (p. 233). Religious movements, Keith Wrightson has reminded us, "do not take place in a social vacuum. They take root and undergo development in particular social contexts and in the complex interaction of ideals and experience they acquire forms and perform roles influenced by such contexts" (Wrightson and Levine, p. 210). The interaction between sect and society involved both integration and conflict, tolerance and intolerance.

It often seems that the so-called debate about popular culture has something of a hollow ring to it; that is, what is occurring is less a funda- mental disagreement than a question of emphasis.6 But whether the start- ing point of cultural analysis should be a division into elite and popular, the assumption of a shared culture, or a stress on cultural multiplicity, the books reviewed here are part of the growing evidence that early modern England was a culturally dynamic and complex society. Hence the importance of this lost world.

BARRY REAY

University of Auckland



BARRY REAY




BARRY REAY




BARRY REAY


6 Compare Barry Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985; reprint, London, 1988), with the book by Tim Harris reviewed here.







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