POPULAR ATTITUDES TOWARDS RURAL CUSTOMS AD RIGHTS I LATE IETEETH AD EARLY TWETIETH CETURY EGLAD Tracey Elizabeth Young submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of PhD (Schedule A) September 2008 ABSTRACT The central aim of this study is to explore rural attitudes concerning subsistence customary practices, such as gleaning from the harvested fields, catching wild rabbits, birds or fish; gathering wild foods; and collecting wood, furze and gorse. It focuses on the period between 1860 and 1920, when social, economic, political and cultural, changes and transformations, were taking place in rural England. It is a comparative regional study of the Cambridge Fens in Cambridgeshire, the Nene River Valley in Northamptonshire and parts of the Chilterns, mostly situated in Buckinghamshire. Tensions and conflicts concerning customary practices were often expressed through petty and social crime, and these can be viewed in the weekly petty session reports published in local and regional newspapers. These are a reliable and continuous historical source regarding the business of the local courts, which along with school log books, memoirs and diaries, provide insights into the attitudes and opinions of rural populations. The particular significance of this study is that it extends the current historiography and aids our understanding of rural conflict associated with popular culture during this period. The continuation and perpetuation of customary beliefs relied on memory, repetition, negotiation and community tenacity. But ultimately the continuation of asserting such rights, and the shape and form this took, depended on the availability of resources in each region, and individual’s and community’s changing needs and requirements. ACKOWLEDGEMETS I would like to thank my supervisor Owen Davies for his guidance, encouragement and academic support over the past few years, and the History Group from the University of Hertfordshire for the bursaries, which enabled me to complete this work. I would also like to express my appreciation for the help I received at various libraries and county archives in the South East of England, in particular the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies in Aylesbury, Northamptonshire’s County Archives, Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies, and the Newspaper Archives at Colindale. I would also like to thank Paul for his assistance in constructing the Access database. COTETS List of Figures List of Appendices Page No. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 21 A Sense of Tradition The concept of tradition Community Knowledge Time CHAPTER 2 78 Conflict: Social Crime, Community and Class Tensions Protest Social crime Everyday forms of resistance Class interplay CHAPTER 3 135 Control and Restrictions of Customary Activity The environment Community control Landed authority The negotiation of power CHAPTER 4 196 Transformation of the Countryside and Changing Attitudes Changes in the countryside The state Composition and organisation CONCLUSION 246 Appendices 254 Bibliography 285 List of Figures Page No. 1 Poaching cases in each region, 1860-1920 49 2 Fish poaching cases in each region, 1860-1920 50 3 Years specifically mentioning gleaning in the Cambridge Fens 51 4 Years specifically mentioning gleaning in the Nene River Valley 51 5 Years specifically mentioning gleaning in parts of the Chilterns 52 6 Seasonality of regional poaching cases, 1860-1920 72 7 Seasonality of regional fish poaching cases, 1860-1920 72 8 Seasonality of regional wood stealing cases, 1860-1920 72 9 School log books 75 10 Total recorded cases from sample newspapers, 1900-1920 76 11 Total recorded cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 95 12 Poaching cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 95 13 Fish poaching cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 96 14 Game taken 98 15 Gleaning cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 100 16 Wild food and nutting cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 101 17 Wood stealing cases from sample newspapers, 1860-1920 102 18 Stealing wood cases in each region, 1860-1920 103 19 Common land 139 20 Acres per person 202 21 Single and multiple poaching offenders 233 22 Regional comparison of multiple poaching offenders 233 List of Appendices Page No. 1 Maps of Regions 254-259 2 Common rights and wild foods 260 3 Population of Regions 261 4 Acreage of Regions 262 5 Newspapers viewed for database 263 6 Petty Session districts of each Region 264 7 Database Information 265-266 8 Landownership 267 9 John Linnell’s opinion on parks and nature 268 10 John Clare Poems 269-271 11 Acts of Parliament 272-274 12 Top landowners in the UK (2001) 275 13 Numbers of night poaching offences across the country 276 14 Public notice at Northampton County Court 277 15 Agricultural Labourers’ Average Weekly Earnings 278 16 Number of owners of land in each county 279 17 National Game Law Convictions 280 18 Percentage of Defendants with Previous Convictions 281 19 Occupation of Poaching Defendants 282 20 Occupation of Fish Poaching Defendants 283 21 Occupation of Wood Stealing Defendants 284 1 ITRODUCTIO This thesis explores rural attitudes towards customary practices in the second half of the nineteenth century by focussing on three specific environmental regions, each of which presented distinct and divergent opportunities for exploiting natural resources. More precisely, it considers how local communities in different environments, landscapes and economies, responded to the loss of popular ‘subsistence’ customs and rights. 1 Resulting tensions and conflicts were often expressed through petty and social crime, and it is by analysing such behaviour that this study evaluates how contemporary social, economic, political and cultural issues influenced rural communities’ perceptions and assertions of ‘traditional’ customary rights in the late nineteenth century. 2 In doing so it makes an original contribution to a historiography on the subject that has been primarily concerned with the erosion of customary rites in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also attempts to uncover rural mentalities, in other words the collective attitudes, unspoken and unconscious assumptions, and perceptions of rural populations, by exploring not only the nature of popular cultures, but also crime and class, along with other aspects of social, economic and political rural life. 3 I have been particularly influenced by the seminal works of David Underdown, Edward P.Thompson, Bob Bushaway and Robert Storch, who developed and highlighted different approaches to the analysis of popular culture and custom. The concept of cultural conflict was explored by David Underdown, who explained how the ‘erosion of rural traditions was hastened by the adoption of the absolutist conceptions of property rights’ in the seventeenth century. 4 His ideas on regional patterns of protest were further developed by Andy Wood in his examination of free miners in the Peak Country during the early modern period. 5 The influential work of E. P.Thompson on customary rights in rural England during the eighteenth century analysed the relationship between custom, law and common right, exploring the role of criminal law, social 1 Customs and rights, which enabled individuals and groups to collect and forage for food and materials in order to sustain a basic standard of living. 2 Concept of tradition will be discussed further in chapter 1, see also B.Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700-1880 (London, 1982), p. 23 and P.Laslett, The World we have lost (London, 1971), pp. 159-178. 3 P.Burke, ‘Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities’, History of European Ideas 17 (1986) 439. For further discussions on the history of mentalities see M.A.Gismondi, ‘The Gift of Theory: A Critique of the Histoire of Mentalities’, Social History 10 (1985) 211-230. 4 D.Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), p. 61. 5 A.Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). 2 relations and the economy. 6 Bob Bushaway’s reconstruction of ‘the ideology of custom’ was concerned with the mechanisms of social cohesion and social disruption throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 7 And finally, Robert Storch’s collection of essays outlined the tensions between continuity and change in customs, rituals, values and beliefs during the nineteenth century. 8 This rich literature provides a foundation on which to build and develop this inquiry into English popular cultures. The analysis of the source material on which this thesis is based has also been influenced by psychological, sociological, and anthropological approaches, and a full and in- depth understanding of the geographical landscape within which the communities in question lived and worked. 9 In order to examine the attitudes, beliefs, ideas, and behaviours of different regional cultures, it will be necessary to first understand and define the complex concepts of popular culture, attitudes and mentalities, about which there has been much debate and disagreement in past historiography. 10 Clifford Geertz, for example, described the concept of culture as purely ‘a semiotic one’, in contrast to Clyde Kluckholn, who gave the concept eleven different definitions. 11 Psychologists, too, admit that the topic of culture and attitude change has been a difficult one, defining attitudes as ‘evaluative beliefs that serve to promote an underlying set of values’. 12 For this study Peter Burke’s concise and coherent definition of culture is appropriate and relevant, for he defined it as ‘a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values’, describing popular culture as a culture of ‘ordinary people…those below the level of the elite’. 13 This approach analyses history ‘from below’ which 6 E.P.Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993). 7 B.Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1800 (London, 1982). 8 R.D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in ineteenth-Century England (London, 1982). 9 See how Sarah Williams drew on the work of anthropologists and sociologists in her study of Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c.