The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance

Peter Harrop, Steve Roud, Peter Harrop, Steve Roud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000401592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history.

Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance – custom and tradition – in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays.

As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

Part I

Folk drama, theatre and performance

Peter Harrop

This is a broader field than the performance of plays by actors for an audience. In addition to performance per se, the folk art described and discussed in Part I accommodates the performative (heightened, expressive communication) and the presentational alongside the dramatic. Participation is central and there is often a fluidity in matters of display and spectatorship (sometimes doing, sometimes watching, always involved). Folk performance is a space where social role, persona, disguise, presentation, representation, personage and stage character often intermingle. Folk performances highlight the customary in their reiterated routes, visits, encounters and assemblies, games, pageants and parades, sometimes plays, and in the familiar personages that occasionally turn up – a St George here, a quack doctor there, Men-Women, a Jack in the Green, a Robin Hood or hobby-horse. Folk performances accompany the heightened expectations, behaviours and interactions of marked moments. They are a creative response to the ‘extra’ ordinary and shared reiterations that mark points of the year, points of our lives, and make special the places where we live.

The ‘mists of time’ that still cling to folk performance are for the most part the lingering effect of first-rate Victorian smoke machines. That smoke clears to reveal a history of widespread creativity, agency and organization, always interwoven with the broader culture of which it is part. Folk performance often engages with the parallel yet accessible track of popular professional and semi-professional theatre from the fifteenth century onwards and is sometimes barely separable from it. Indeed, folk performances so often achieve other lives across print media, art and theatre, that it can sometimes be difficult to disentangle a customary reiteration from an artistic appropriation, or even to establish a direction of travel. In the case of the mummers’ play, surely the best-known example of an English folk drama, the earliest suggestion of a performance and the earliest example of a printed text fall very close together.

An example: rough music

Our cover illustration is the 1726 William Hogarth engraving ‘Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington’. This is a depiction of charivari or ‘rough music’, a persistent and widespread European performance form intended to humiliate those responsible for transgressing normative marital relations. Hogarth’s work was first printed in a new edition of Samuel Butler’s 1664 satirical work Hudibras and shows the eponymous Presbyterian attempting to disrupt a community performance.¹

The enactment – in general terms – mocks a local couple whose transgressions might have included domestic abuse or unfaithfulness, or simply being part of an unpopular marriage, or a second marriage, or marriage deemed inappropriate by discrepancy of age, wealth or background. In the picture itself, one performer represents the husband sitting backwards on a horse and carrying a distaff, while another, a man dressed as a woman, represents his wife beating him with a ladle – the ‘skimmington’ of the title. Just a few feet away, a cuckold’s horns and petticoats are held aloft over other symbols of marital discord. The central personages are parading through a village accompanied by a crowd, some playing rough music; one contributor is throwing or swinging a cat to contribute to the cacophony. Production values are obviously in play; there are two main actors, seemingly two musicians, horses, instruments, costumes and properties. Some are more makeshift than others, some more impromptu – such as the poor, pressganged cat. Children have joined in – one child, though cropped out from our cover, is happily stealing sausages – then, in the background, there are the faces of the crowd. They look angry. This is a rumbustious public display, but also personal and up-close for the targeted couple, even where wrongdoing may have been popularly ascribed to a single partner. It is a crowded, layered, personalized discord of role reversal, cross-dressing, gendered properties and persistent noise. Seventeenth-century accounts describe the engagement of immediate and near neighbours, sometimes willing participants, sometimes coerced to take part in the enactment as retribution for their perceived tolerance of matters they must surely have known about. Outcomes for those targeted, though not violent, could be long lasting and occasionally tragic.

Descriptions of rough music (referenced regionally by words and phrases such as ‘skimmington’ or ‘riding the stang’) illustrate, in Thomas Pettitt’s telling phrase, a highly performative ‘folk law’. Performances were both commonplace and noteworthy enough to allow the folklorist Violet Alford to make a comparison of some 250 examples from across Europe citing one French example dating back as far as 1377.² Unsurprisingly, given issues of distribution and longevity, this is a broad spectrum of customary activity, manifesting very differently at different times and places. Its legality in England, for example, was being questioned by 1500; yet, the most detailed accounts are found only from the 1560s onwards. At the other end of a significant duration – not all folk productions enjoy such long runs – there is a detailed newspaper account from Berkshire in 1930³ and mention of other more recent contenders.

Three more examples: popular and courtly mumming, mummers’ plays

Mummers’ plays circumscribed a discussion of English folk drama for much of the twentieth century and not in a helpful way. The word ‘mumming’ first crops up in the fourteenth century to describe small groups of people playing a game of conceal and reveal. Wearing each other’s clothes, sometimes cross-dressed, with masks or facial disguises, keeping silent to further disguise their identities, they would seek entry to private houses to play the hosts at dice and perhaps dance with them. This was risky as well as risqué and the first effort to put a stop to it was a London proclamation made in 1334. It was specifically forbidden by an Act of Parliament in 1511, but there were further proclamations in Newcastle upon Tyne and Chester as late as the 1550s. Indeed, the Reverend Henry Bourne of Newcastle was still complaining about it in arguably the first work of folklore, his Popular Antiquities of 1725. ‘Mumming; which is a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dress’d in each other’s Habits, go from one Neighbour’s house to another, and partake of their Christmas-Cheer, and make Merry with them in Disguise…’.⁴ Medieval mumming seems to have aspired to a sustained frisson, right on the edge of multiple gate-crashing, but with an expectation that the masked visitor/intruder would prove entertaining or rewarding in some way, the central game of dice neatly reflecting the uncertain outcome of the visitation.

Despite the earlier prohibition, a 1377 ‘mumming’ was held as part of the celebration of Prince Richard’s tenth birthday. One hundred and thirty costumed and masked men, bearing torches, cavalcaded from the City of London to Kennington: their dice precisely loaded to ensure the Prince won three games in succession, each time securing a different gold gift. No risk involved here – this was the structure of a popular custom, but event managed with theatrical precision. Without suggesting a direct line of descent, such elaborate and gilded theatricality never went away; its later manifestation as the Stuart masque disdained the complex dramatic narrative of popular public theatre while honing the symbolic, referential and allusive qualities of pictorial performance.

Popular mumming continued as a Christmastime custom, often under alternative regional names such as ‘guising’, and increasingly as an activity for children, certainly into the twentieth century – indeed, we hear its echo at Halloween. But by the 1770s, the word mummer started to be used in a quite different way. It achieved popularity as a generic term for a not very good actor, coincidentally at a time when strolling players were becoming a familiar sight across much of the country. The precise phrase ‘mummers’ play’, however, was not coined until 1849, although hindsight enables us to discern a few early mummers’ play performances from the second half of the eighteenth century followed by a burgeoning across much of the country throughout the nineteenth.

Mummers’ plays are short, amateur performances, in verse, performed by men and boys, usually toured around private and public houses in return for gifts of food, drink and money. They are associated with different points of the year in different regions, from Halloween through Christmas and New Year to Easter, and there are endless creative variants and embellishments as one would expect from a widespread custom with long duration. Numerous detailed studies have shown regional variations with certain characters and narrative features proving more popular in particular places and at particular times. Similarly, their performers have capitalized on, or have already been involved with, other local customs that combine to elaborate the basic structure and provide local appeal. In Cheshire, the play attaches to soulcaking, a Halloween custom, and features a wild horse (usually a real horse’s skull, treated and blackened, on a post, with a snapping jaw). In Yorkshire, the play has interwoven with the regional longsword dance (a late eighteenth-century European import) to provide a unique motif. In Lincolnshire during the 1880s and 1890s, a recruiting sergeant took a central role, and there are elements of comic courtship not found in other parts of the country. By far, the most common plot line, both over time and geographically, includes a fight between two heroes – usually St George and an exotic foreign adversary, closely followed by the ministrations of a quack doctor. Following recent work by Thomas Pettitt⁵ and Peter Harrop,⁶ we can see that the plays combine multiple arrangements of already fa...